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Artificial beaver dams saw juvenile coho salmon survival rates go from 8% to 60%

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Re: Artificial beaver dams saw juvenile coho salmon survival rates go from 8% to 60%

#81

Post by elmolino89 »

richiebful1 wrote: post #10

It was an interesting, but counterintuitive result that water temperatures went down after artificial beaver damming. Their theory is that the water is able to permeate more into the ground and exchange heat with the ambient underground temperature [1] 1. https://www.science.org/content/article/beaver-dams-without-...

Imho wetlands and beaver dams increase median water flow in the creeks. Without them you get a spikes of flash floods in extreme cases and a dry/just trickling stream for the dry periods. The other benefit of a higher water table and less violent water flow is the riparian vegetation shading the water.

Re: Artificial beaver dams saw juvenile coho salmon survival rates go from 8% to 60%

#82

Post by bcjdjsndon »

pvaldes wrote: post #8
josefresco wrote: post #2

Maybe I missed it, why didn't they just reintroduce beavers?

> Maybe I missed it, why didn't they just reintroduce beavers? My guess is that trees are not there in numbers enough to support beavers. Or maybe they don't want beavers chopping the trees.

The latter. You are basically English, and look at us... Not a single wild predator larger than a rat. No bears, wolves, wild dogs, wild cats, not even snakes or spiders or hornets cos we killed them all. I'm just not sure it's possible cos America is so vast and has land borders

Re: Artificial beaver dams saw juvenile coho salmon survival rates go from 8% to 60%

#84

Post by BrtByte »

PetitPrince wrote: post #69

My youtube feed gets a decent amount of recommendation from channels such as Mossy Earth, Plant Wild, etc. that showcase some nature restauration project. While I cannot help myself to be a bit skeptical of those efforts (how really sustainable is all of this; isn't that just a tiny drop in the ocean, etc.), I really like to have positive and hopeful news like the one of this article amidst all the ambient negativity…

At the very least they give us real-world experiments for what works, and honestly I will take the occasional bit of ecological good news over another article explaining how doomed everything is

Re: Artificial beaver dams saw juvenile coho salmon survival rates go from 8% to 60%

#85

Post by BrtByte »

_whiteCaps_ wrote: post #20

There's a really good book about a homesteader that did something similar to this in the 1930's in British Columbia, "Three Against The Wilderness". Basically he restored the dams that had been dynamited by the ranchers, and that restored all of the wetlands in the area. Later on, the government brought him some beavers from elsewhere, and they flourished.

Funny how much of "ecological restoration" sometimes turns out to be undoing a change we made decades ago and then letting the original ecosystem resume doing the maintenance for us

Re: Artificial beaver dams saw juvenile coho salmon survival rates go from 8% to 60%

#86

Post by bcjdjsndon »

lbriner wrote: post #80
petcat wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The beavers are still there, just not in high numbers like they used to be. Right now the ecosystem can only support the population that is already there. Maybe eventually it will support more and then the number will increase naturally.

It is not so much the eco-system, it is the need for a full food-chain of animals to keep populations in-check. We like deer but without wolves or large cats, the deer become a pest but we don't like wolves and large cats because we are all taught as children that they are scary and dangerous - although more children die from car accidents and stabbings than wild animals so whatever! So natural predators for small ro…

> it is the need for a full food-chain of animals to keep populations in-check

The error you make is that there is only one, global ecosystem, and it sorts itself out. We won't be matching the power of the dinosaur comet anytime soon, and even that gave rise to mammals and eventually space travel so just chill... We dont need to do a thing

Re: Artificial beaver dams saw juvenile coho salmon survival rates go from 8% to 60%

#87

Post by BrtByte »

Waterluvian wrote: post #48
_whiteCaps_ wrote: post #20

There's a really good book about a homesteader that did something similar to this in the 1930's in British Columbia, "Three Against The Wilderness". Basically he restored the dams that had been dynamited by the ranchers, and that restored all of the wetlands in the area. Later on, the government brought him some beavers from elsewhere, and they flourished.

I love this. Especially the part where you can ask the Government of Canada for beavers. But it feels like there’s a bit of surprise to the idea that the environment takes on the form it takes on. And if you take away a part of it, it’ll take on a different form. And if you put that part back, it can take on the earlier form. There is no correct or canonical form.

Restoration can sometimes imply there is one true historical state we're supposed to recreate, which is probably the wrong mental model. In this case it seems more like restoring a missing process than restoring a particular landscape. Put the ecosystem engineer back and let the ecosystem decide what comes next

Re: Artificial beaver dams saw juvenile coho salmon survival rates go from 8% to 60%

#88

Post by BrtByte »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #65

I wrote a while back about some coho fry populations I found which would have benefitted tremendously from dams. Each day I returned I would find more and more empty pools along the river, picked clean of fish where I’d previously seen dozens or hundreds of fry. Beavers used to live here in great numbers, but these days it’s fairly uncommon to see them. I bet they saved a lot of coho back in their day. https://steve-…

[dead]

Re: Artificial beaver dams saw juvenile coho salmon survival rates go from 8% to 60%

#89

Post by pvaldes »

josefresco wrote: post #2

Maybe I missed it, why didn't they just reintroduce beavers?

We need a professional approach there, able to see the whole picture. Amateurism can be really expensive.

Sometimes beavers are a big mistake. Hazelnuts and willows can be chopped to the ground and just will return stronger and more dense. Poplars will regrow from the roots at some distance. Argentinian trees they will vanish instead. This happens because temperate South American forests never evolved with beavers. On this places they may done more harm than good.

Re: Artificial beaver dams saw juvenile coho salmon survival rates go from 8% to 60%

#90

Post by cucumber3732842 »

devilbunny wrote: post #45
cucumber3732842 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the government makes the water that comes with them a huge liability. Tons of vacant land owners would be happy to allow beavers and everything else if not for the fact that it destroys any prospect of doing anything on the land.

His freeform, not-too-serious libertarianism can easily be mocked, but PJ O’Rourke did have a very good point about well-intentioned but counterproductive environmental legislation like the laws governing wetlands: imagine that, should an Old Master painting be discovered on your property, you were required immediately to cease all other use of the property and protect that Old Master painting against damage or theft…

Regardless of specific political ideology it only takes a room temperature IQ to realize that copy pasting the concept of Royal Forests from Norman England to today is probably gonna cause all the same perverse incentives and hardship and stunt wealth accumulation/progress in the affected areas and so on. What did we spend the last few decades of the 20th century doing? Basically that.

The other real fucked up thing is that most of it is state/local implementations of federal rules but that's insane because California has a completely different relationship with swamps and water than the Carolinas.

The worst of it will probably get unwound when the courts adopt a "no you idiots, a fractional taking is still a taking pay the F up" doctrine but that might be a century from now. There's sooooo much money tied up in it though.

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