Beavers are helping restore wetlands and create buffers against wildfires | Hacker News Reader

Beavers are helping restore wetlands and create buffers against wildfires

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85 pointsDoreenMichele27 comments

Lots more related discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36936008

Beavers also raise the water table. I heard or read somewhere that it's partially because the sheer weight of the water behind the dams. This study found an increase of about one foot in the water table following relocation of 69 beaver in Washington State:

We evaluated changes in temperature and water storage following the relocation of 69 beaver into 13 headwater stream reaches of the Skykomish River watershed within the Snohomish River basin, Washington, USA. We evaluated how beaver dams affected surface and groundwater storage and stream temperature. Successful relocations created 243 m3 of surface water storage per 100 m of stream in the first year following relocation. Dams raised water table elevations by up to 0.33 m and stored approximately 2.4 times as much groundwater as surface water per relocation reach.

https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecs2...

That's incredible! 69 individuals having such an impact on the ecosystem around them is astonighing

So can same number of loggers at a location.

The point with beavers is with time the impact is more of complex and emergent system that we find utterly fascinating. Locals hate beavers

Another cool article on beavers’ measured impact in Idaho after they were reintroduced from NASA: https://appliedsciences.nasa.gov/our-impact/story/researcher...

Ha ha ha, NASA. Relocating Beavers, eh?

Proof that the American Imperialist State wants to force relocate Canadians to Mars, so they can take over our maple farms, and use their output as feed stuff! Feed stuff for their genetically grown, bacterialogocal vats producing mind control agents!

Everyone, the news has been withheld! Filtered! The massive fires in Quebec forests, are us denying the US our precious maple sugar! We set those fires, thus preventing an invasion!

Don't let them do this to Canada! Your country will be next! Resist, and mak<no carrier>

So… you didn’t read it? This comment is wild and entertaining!

Everyone in the Colorado needs to pitch in and get beaver restoration going in the upper Colorado, if they want drinking water in fifteen years.

There's a lot of that happening in the Front Range (east side, not the Colorado). In addition to the mentioned benefits, beaver dams are also great at filtering debris from recent wildfires from continuing downstream.

Beavers are terraforming Alaska, actually I guess technically whatever the opposite of terraforming is?

https://www.businessinsider.com/beavers-invade-alaska-arctic...

Restoration?

Castorgenically induced terrestrial succession

Shrill article. The tundra is going away. We can’t refrigerate a million square miles. Do beavers replace the dying tundra with something that is more resilient to climate change? Oh hell yes. Let them.

Humans: cause global climate change

Animals: react to changing climate

Humans: look at how these animals have wrecked my planet, we must intervene to stop them

—

also Earth can’t undergo terraforming or antiterraforming. It will always be fully earth-like (terra-formed).

> Earth can’t undergo terraforming or antiterraforming. It will always be fully earth-like

Terraforming tends a world towards Earth’s “pristine” state. We wouldn’t start dumping PFAS on Venus solely because they’re on Earth.

bioforming

I find it humorous that when man makes a dam (even small ones, like on one's own property [1]) it's destroying the ecosystem and stealing water from downstream and bad but when an oversized rodent does, it's 'restoring wetlands' and 'buffers against wildfires'.

[1] https://gazette.com/news/a-pond-farewell-state-cracks-down-o...

It seems to be ok as long as the dam is constructed in a way that mimics what beavers would do, and better yet, is something beavers can take over.

https://www.science.org/content/article/beaver-dams-without-...

Human geoengineering can be a positive as well, we just have to actually... do it.

The before and after of beavers tends to show them creating and enhancing ecosystems by all of the metrics you can reasonably think of.

Dams being bad is entirely scale-dependent. Small dams that retain water in basins without cutting off flow are definitely net positive. The retained moisture promotes growth of plants that shade and shelter the water, reducing evaporation and increasing water supply.

Beaver dams are different. They leak, let fish through, and disappear every few years. Details matter.

This is the key and overlooked part of it all. Plus they can move upstream or downstream as situations dictate.

Good point. It's almost like the word system in ecosystem is important. Haha.

Your comment makes me want to learn more about beavers. I'm interested but don't know much.

I think most dams (small low head dams, often abandoned) have those same properties.

3 years vs 30 years. And you usually regulate the river around the dam so it can't meander, beaver dams make the river meander around them. So after 30 years you maybe return to status quo with a small, abandoned human dam. In that time you would have 10 different riverbed changes with beavers and all that area is now marsh.

Making changes on your own property impacts other people's property. There isn't a conspiracy to prevent people from accumulating water. They want to prevent idiots from flooding their neighbors or completely cutting them off from water.

https://wlos.com/news/local/news-13-help-desk-waynesville-ma...

These types of laws formed when companies actually abused water rights and completely shut off access to anyone further downstream from them. Imagine a series of farms along a river. Then a mining company come along and sets up operation closer to the source. Since mining is very water intensive, they divert the river for their own uses cutting off access to the farms which used to depend on it. That's supposed to just be okay?

Humans want to create tall (ideally, hundreds of feet tall) dams which impound a lot of water with minimal effort which stand for 100 years. We're really at it, and we care next to nothing for animals which need to go upstream / downstream.

Beavers want to eliminate that damnable gurgling sound by piling a few feet of wood around it. They're not great at it, and animals are basically free to go upstream / downstream. The dams percolate through the mud, leak and rot away, lasting days to years, but not decades.

They're dramatically different activities. You're better off comparing beaver "dams" to terraced rice cultivation in hill country, where the entire valley floor turns into innumerable sheets of flat water draining into each other in six inch elevation changes held back by bamboo and mud. A two year old with water wings can destroy a whole town's paddies if allowed to run free. Repairs are a daily thing.

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