{"id":61609,"date":"2022-01-22T18:56:53","date_gmt":"2022-01-22T23:56:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=61609"},"modified":"2022-01-22T18:56:53","modified_gmt":"2022-01-22T23:56:53","slug":"beavers-offer-lessons-about-managing-water-in-a-changing-climate-whether-the-challenge-is-drought-or-floods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=61609","title":{"rendered":"Beavers offer lessons about managing water in a changing climate, whether the challenge is drought or floods"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Beavers offer lessons about managing water in a changing climate, whether the challenge is drought or floods<\/a><\/h3>\n

It\u2019s no accident that both the\u00a0Massachusetts Institute of Technology<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0California Institute of Technology<\/a>\u00a0claim the beaver (Castor canadensis<\/em>) as their mascots. Renowned engineers, beavers seem able to dam any stream, building structures with logs and mud that can flood large areas.<\/p>\n

As climate change causes extreme storms in some areas and intense drought in others, scientists are finding that beavers\u2019 small-scale natural interventions\u00a0are valuable<\/a>. In dry areas, beaver ponds restore moisture to the soil; in wet zones, their dams and ponds can help to slow floodwaters. These ecological services are so useful that land managers are translocating beavers\u00a0in the U.S.<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0the United Kingdom<\/a>\u00a0to help restore ecosystems and make them more resilient to climate change.<\/p>\n

Scientists estimate that\u00a0hundreds of millions of beavers<\/a>\u00a0once dammed waterways across the Northern Hemisphere. They were\u00a0hunted nearly to extinction for their fur<\/a>\u00a0in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe and North America but are\u00a0making comebacks today<\/a>\u00a0in many areas. As a\u00a0geoscientist specializing in water resources<\/a>, I think it\u2019s important to understand how helpful beavers can be in the\u00a0right places<\/a>\u00a0and to find ways for humans to coexist with them in developed areas.<\/p>\n

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How beavers alter landscapes<\/strong><\/p>\n

Beavers\u00a0dam streams to create ponds<\/a>, where they can construct their dome-shaped lodges in the water, keeping predators at a distance. When they create a pond, many other effects follow.<\/p>\n

Newly flooded trees die but remain standing as bare \u201csnags\u201d where birds nest. The diverted streams create complicated interwoven channels of slow-moving water, tangled with logs and plants that provide hiding places for fish. The messy complexity behind a beaver dam creates many different kinds of habitats for creatures such as fish, birds, frogs and insects.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Beavers offer lessons about managing water in a changing climate, whether the challenge is drought or floods It\u2019s no accident that both the\u00a0Massachusetts Institute of Technology\u00a0and the\u00a0California Institute of Technology\u00a0claim the beaver (Castor canadensis) as their mascots. Renowned engineers, beavers seem able to dam any stream, building structures with logs and mud that can flood […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[32536,32537,141,220,2175,8487,866,4703],"class_list":["post-61609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-beavers","tag-christine-e-hatch","tag-climate-change","tag-drought","tag-floods","tag-the-conversation","tag-water","tag-water-management"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61609"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61610,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61609\/revisions\/61610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}