Solutions

How beavers could help the Colorado River survive future droughts

Photo: In this undated file photo, a beaver appears near the shoreline of the Bear Creek which feeds into the South Platte River just outside Denver, Colorado. STOCK IMAGE/Getty Images

Humans can take a lesson from beavers’ engineering on how to conserve water.

The humble beaver could become one of America’s hardest working allies in the race to adapt to climate change.

Beavers are natural engineers. They instinctively build dams and canals of water to keep themselves safe because they’re clumsy on land. And capturing that water creates ecosystems for other animals to survive, earning beavers the moniker of a “keystone species.”

A growing movement of nonprofits, experts and government agencies see a potential to take a lesson from beavers’ natural engineering prowess to capture more of that water for the places that desperately need it.

“Beavers benefit a lot of things in the context of climate change,” Emily Fairfax, assistant professor of environmental science and resource management at California State University Channel Islands, told ABC News.

“The ones that are most directly sort of in our eyesight right now is the beavers’ ability to protect ecosystems during droughts, during floods, during wildfires, during extreme disturbances. And in those patches of habitat that they’re protecting, there’s a huge amount of biodiversity.”

In addition to storing water, Fairfax’s research has shown that areas with beaver dams are more resilient to wildfires because the plants and trees are so wet they don’t burn. And she said they could help capture water from extreme rain events like the atmospheric rivers in California to be accessed by those water systems later.

“Beavers sort of figured this out instinctually over 7 million years of evolution that their dams and their canals work because they take the whole hydrologic cycle and they just make it more stable, more consistent,” she said.

Beavers haven’t always been recognized for their benefits. Fur trapping dramatically reduced the population starting in the 1700s and even today beavers are sometimes seen as a nuisance and killed. The animals are sometimes relocated away from urban areas where their dams could cause disruptions and flooding, which experts like Fairfax said can sometimes be appropriate but is not always the right approach.

Instead of treating them like pests, groups like the National Forest Foundation are looking to take a lesson from beavers’ work to find a nature-based approach to adapt to impacts of climate change like worsening drought conditions.

“There’s a lot of streams and headwaters to the Colorado River that used to run perennially, year-round, that we now see have stopped. And so we might be able to, as we do enough of these, turn some of those stream flows back on […]

Full article: How beavers could help the Colorado River survive future droughts

Also see: The Science Behind Atmospheric Rivers

Summary
Article Name
How beavers could help the Colorado River survive future droughts
Description
National Forest Foundation looks to beavers’ work to find nature-based approach to impact of climate change like worsening drought conditions.
Author
Publisher Name
ABC News
Publisher Logo

Recent Posts

LA River restoration connects us back to ‘the life force of our city’

Los Angeles residents at a section of the Los Angeles River cleanup in Los Angeles,…

2 days ago

LAist: New study raises questions about heavy metals in fire retardants

Over the past decade, about 67 million gallons of fire retardant have been dropped on…

2 days ago

Meadow and watershed restoration in the Golden Trout Wilderness

Photo: Golden Trout Wilderness Seeking blue, seeing gold The Kern Plateau features a chain of…

2 days ago

First sighting of salmon in 100 years marks key milestone for California dam removal

For the first time in more than a century, a salmon was observed swimming through Klamath…

1 week ago

Developing state water roadmaps is essential

New turnout facility from the California Aqueduct on Monday, Oct. 23, 2023. Officials say the…

2 weeks ago

Migration Matters: Breaking Down Barriers to Migration

Over the past century, humans have constructed major transportation infrastructure like highways, bridges, railroads, and…

3 weeks ago