Dam good! Beavers may restore imperiled streams, fish population

Utah State University scientists report a watershed-scale experiment in highly degraded streams within Oregon’s John Day Basin demonstrates building beaver dam analogs allows beavers to increase their dam building activities, which benefits a threatened population of steelhead trout.

Bouwes is lead author of a paper published July 4, 2016, in the journal Nature’s online, open access Scientific Reports that details the seven-year experiment conducted in streams within north central Oregon’s Bridge Creek Watershed. Contributing authors are Bouwes’ USU colleagues Carl Saunders and Joe Wheaton, along with Nicholas Weber of Eco Logical Research, Chris Jordan and Michael Pollock of NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, Ian Tattam of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and Carol Volk of Washington’s South Fork Research, Inc.

When Lewis and Clark made their way through the Pacific Northwest in the early 19th century, the area’s streams teemed with steelhead and beaver. But subsequent human activities, including harvesting beaver to near extirpation, led to widespread degradation of fish habitat.

Bouwes says these activities may have also exacerbated stream channel incision, meaning a rapid down-cutting of stream beds, which disconnects a channel from its floodplain and near-stream vegetation from the water table. He notes beavers build dams in the incised trenches, but because of the lack of large, woody material, their dams typically fail within a year.

“Our goal was to encourage beaver to build on stable structures that would increase dam life spans, capture sediment, raise the stream and reconnect the stream to its floodplain,” Bouwes says. “We expected this would result in both an increase in near-stream vegetation and better fish habitat.”

What really impressed us was how quickly the stream bed built up behind the dams and how water was spilling onto the floodplain, Bouwes says.

The researchers also documented increases in fish habitat quantity and quality in their study watershed relative to the watershed that received no BDAs and saw little increase in beaver activity. The changes in habitat in the watershed receiving BDAs resulted in a significant uptick in juvenile steelhead numbers, survival and production.

Go read the original research here. Maybe I have a simple mind but this graph makes me very happy.

Many beaver fans have been talking about this for over a decade, but it took until 2016 for this work to be published at the watershed level, showing large scale advantages. If you want to know how long this has been in the oven, here’s a reminder.

This film was made in 2010, so you know the work was started before that. It takes a long time to document the effects that beavers have in creeks. Fortunately for us, this work just keeps attracting more and younger minds along the way, which means it can continue however long it takes to finally convince folk that beavers are good news for fish.

Oh and I received my beaver festival hat yesterday, so I’m all ready.

Maybe you really can get everything at Walmart…

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Who's saving beavers now? January 9, 2016

Yesterday was the third conference call for the rapidly growing chapter on urban beavers. While the last one left me feeling like I was surrounded by nobel scientists and barely qualified to participate, this one made me realize that I actually do have a very specifically valuable skill set. During the call I would make comments that seemed fairly obvious to me – like how stream complexity isn’t anything a city engineer wants, or why dead wood is seen as a threat in city streams and quickly removed, or how flow devices require stream alteration permits in California – and they kept being surprised and grateful that I said them because they would never have thought of that.

It finally dawned on me that actually living in an actual town with actual beavers for a decade produced a pretty remarkable learning curve. And I guess it’s okay I don’t know what evapotranspiration means. Because I know other things. Useful things. And in nine years I have learned something about how to save beavers.

Not everything, but something.

Anyway, I’m grateful my coauthors who send treats like this my way. This is from a beaver management plan written for that Walmart in Logan, Utah by Elijah Portugal, Joseph Wheaton, and Nick Bouwes. I was told it was shareable as long as I gave credit, so I’m adding it to the website until someone tells me personally to take it down. It’s definitely worth reading and fills me in Martinez with a longing I think only Salieri can have felt for Mozart, but WOW is it worth it.

Take a good long look at that chart, and see how far you get down the page before you use extermination. Honestly this made me so happy I felt giddy when I saw it. Imagine a place where trapping beaver wasn’t the first or even the second solution that was thought of.

For comparison: here is the complex decision tree that most cities [and Martinez if it were left up to them] employ.

And the winner is – UTAH!

heidi08 Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, featured, Friends of Martinez Beavers, In the News, Who's saving beavers now? October 13, 2015

The states of Washington and Utah have been running a neck-to-neck competition to be the beaver Mecca of America. They are both brilliant at beaver management in so many ways and light years ahead of their border cousins. For a while it looked like Washington, (with heavy weights like NOAA, Michael Pollock and the Methow project) was in the lead. But now Utah, (with beaver Shamans Mary Obrien of GLCT and Joe Wheaton at Utah State), has just made a giant leap forward.

Utah: Even their WALMARTs are smarter than yours.

Project helps protect Logan beavers, reduce threat of flooding

LOGAN — A project in Logan may be a lifesaver for beavers, and it may help Wal-Mart get along better with its furry neighbors. Workers have installed a system intended to reduce the threat of flooding caused by beaver dams.

“Killing beaver just didn’t seem like the right way to go,” said Dan Miller, chairman of the Bear River Watershed Council. “There was a better solution, and this is definitely it.”

The new system regulates the level of a beaver pond, functioning more or less like the overflow drain on a bathtub. It prevents the beaver pond from rising too high and overfilling.

Beaver dams store water in the springtime and allow it to trickle downstream in the late summer, a process that benefits downstream water users, he said.
“They help with the water quality,” Bouwes said, “by capturing a lot of sediment and other materials that we would have to clean up otherwise.”

Okay, Utah has some crazy ideas about women and minority rights and wants to sell back their national parks, but HEY they install flow devices at WALMART, so watch out America. This is what visionary looks like! Now Walmart needs to donate a field cam and install it on sight so they can see some photos of the wild creatures they just saved. (Better photos = more media = and more advertising of their good deed.)

I would send a thank you note to the good folk who approved this project, but I can’t find any details about management. Guess we better send our thanks to Nick Bouwes at Utah State and Dan Miller of the massive Bear River Watershed group. That should keep us busy.