How Beavers Are Helping Fight Climate Change

Beavers are dam-building, furry little cuties but did you also know that these adorable rodents can help protect landscapes from wildfires and drought and fight climate change?

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*How do Beavers mitigate climate change?*

Beavers are a keystone species - any organism, from animals and plants to bacteria and fungi that play a crucial role in holding a habitat together. A beaver's main goal in their habitat is to make a pond for themselves to live in. They do so by building a dam and digging a bunch of little canals out from their ponds. What they are really doing, though, is slowing down the flow of water. This not only helps them survive, but it also benefits humans. The slowed-down water has time to sink into the soil and spread out into the floodplain. And so when things like drought or forest fires happen, there's more stored water in the earth that prevents fires from spreading.

*Beaver History*

There used to be a BUNCH of beavers on this continent; there were anywhere from 100 to 400 million beavers here before the European fur trade and colonial settlements. But between colonizers building homes near streams and wetlands and also the fact that most Europeans thought beavers were pests and only valued them for their fur, beavers nearly went extinct, with their population shrinking by 90%.

*Coexisting w/ beavers*

Many Indigenous communities here in the U.S. have always known about the positive impacts of beavers. Today, some tribes are working with local governments to help restore beaver populations and building artificial logjams to encourage beavers to come back. Humans and beavers are very similar, so sharing a territory with an animal like that challenges our human desire to be in control. This can be tricky but beavers are just doing what they’re on this earth to do: something that Indigenous people have recognized for years as necessary to human-nature balance. So going forward how do we humans adapt our environment to include beavers and all that they do?

Selected Sources

https://www.nrdc.org/stories/keystone-species-101
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-beaver-emerges-as-a-climate-solving-hero/
https://www.nrdc.org/resources/beavers-natures-wetland-ecosystem-engineers
https://www.sfchronicle.com/climate/article/California-beaver-17421023.php?sid=5ad93b982a077c56b0777fbd&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=headlines&utm_campaign=sfc_morningfix
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/hunted-extinction-england-s-first-wild-beavers-400-years-allowed-n1236023
https://www.hcn.org/articles/wildlife-klamath-tribes-want-beavers-back-in-the-beaver-state
https://www.yakimaherald.com/sports/outdoors/unprecedented-salmon-recovery-funds-to-benefit-yakima-basin-projects/article_0cae59b2-3e98-11ed-b190-7b019001a3d6.html
https://www.audubon.org/news/a-world-without-beavers-world-without-wildlife-we-love
​​https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/taking-nuisance-beavers-out-suburbs-can-help-save-salmon-180977491/
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-07/california-launches-beaver-restoration-program-to-fight-climate-change
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/keystone-species
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2022/09/beavers-wildfires-wetlands-conservation-flooding-publicist/

Chapters:

00:00 Intro
01:05 How do Beavers fight climate change?
02:41 Beavers and Carbon
03:00 Keystone Species
03:45 Beavers through History
05:12 Ecological Amnesia
05:46 Indigenous communities and Beavers
7:00 Coexisting with Beavers

#beavers #climatechange #biodiversity

Видео How Beavers Are Helping Fight Climate Change канала Above The Noise