It’s starting to accumulate. The good news about how beavers can make a difference to our drying planet. It seems ;like nearly every day there’s a headline about why beavers matter. From new articles like this published in Biodiversity and Conservation by a host of familiar names.
Beaver creates early successional hotspots for water beetles
Beavers (Castor spp.) are ecosystem engineers that induce local disturbance and ecological succession, which turns terrestrial into aquatic ecosystems and creates habitat heterogeneity in a landscape. Beavers have been proposed as a tool for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem restoration. So far, most research has compared biodiversity in beaver wetlands and non-beaver wetlands, but few studies have explored how beaver-created succession affects specific taxa. In this study, we investigated how water beetles responded to different successional stages of wetlands in a beaver-disturbed landscape at Evo in southern Finland. We sampled water beetles with 1-L activity traps in 20 ponds, including: 5 new beaver ponds, 5 old beaver ponds, 5 former beaver ponds, and 5 never engineered ponds. We found that beaver wetlands had higher species richness and abundance than non-beaver wetlands, and that new beaver wetlands could support higher species richness (321%) and abundance (671%) of water beetles compared to old beaver wetlands. We think that higher water beetle diversity in new beaver ponds has resulted from habitat amelioration (available lentic water, shallow shores, aquatic vegetation, and low fish abundance) and food source enhancement (an increase of both dead and live prey) created by beaver dams and floods. We conclude that using beavers as a tool, or imitating their way of flooding, can be beneficial in wetland restoration if beaver population densities are monitored to ensure the availability of newly colonizable sites.
So its true, there’s more stuff to eat in a beaver pond which is good news for beetles, but there are more things that eat THEM in a beaver pond, because as the fox observed in the little prince, “Nothing is perfect”.
But what about benefits of the non-beetle variety? I mean it can’t all be about the beetles right?
Get Wild: Beavers are the answer
In Summit County, beavers are neighbors to ranchers and urban dwellers, and in both cases, their reputation has not fared well. They flood fields and roads with their dams and find ornamental trees in town irresistibly yummy.
They’re called nuisance beavers, but things are changing.
Biologists have long documented how beaver ponds enrich the ecological habitat for innumerable species of plants and animals, and as people realize the toll of global extinctions and the grave loss of biodiversity, a different descriptor for beavers is gaining traction: keystone species.
More recently, large-scale studies using satellite imagery have shown that beavers significantly mitigate the devastation of wildfires. For example, extensive analysis by ecohydrologist Emily Fairfax of wildfires in five western states, including Colorado, showed that beaver presence reduced the fire damage overall by threefold compared with damage near streams lacking beavers.
Okay. Got that? The nuisance beaver you all complain about can bring biodiversity, rescues animal and plant species and keep your area from burning to a crisp. Does that merit not being killed? I ask you?
The reasons are well known: Beaver ponds feed groundwater, which allows plants to withstand drought and wildfire better. And it doesn’t end with plants. Beaver ponds provide refugia — places where organisms can survive unfavorable conditions — for animals imperiled by fire or other existential threats. Given the explosive increase of wildfires in the West, these results are perking up ears at public agencies.
Well sure beavers can save species and prevent floods but can they do anything else? Are they some kind of Johnny one-note that can only help biodiversity and fires?
And the benefits of beavers aren’t limited to drought areas.
In the upper Midwest, drought is not the problem but rather increased precipitation in the form of more frequent megastorms with consequent flooding of cities like Milwaukee. Data shows that upstream beaver dams could reduce the flooding by about 40% by buffering the water flow and reduce the economic cost of flood damage much, much more (beavers
Thus, beavers help us with both drought and deluge! As one observer has said, “Beavers are the answer. The question is irrelevant.”
Oh okay. Those show-off beavers can prevent floods too. Big whoop. So what if they can increase biodiversity, recharge groundwater, stop fires, remove toxins and prevent floods.
Can they cure cancer? Sniff. I didn’t think so.
