A stop-motion animation showing how a beaver dam can react to a wildfire.
(Emily Fairfax via Twitter)
- Streams with beaver dams burn 3 times less often than streams without them
- Damded areas may be increasingly important in massive fires
- The current beaver population in North America is 10% of its historical population
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What does beavers have to do with forest fire mitigation? Quite a lot, as it turns out. I talked about it with Dr. Emily Fairfax, an ecologist at California State University-Channel Islands who studies (among other things) how beaver dams affect the landscape around them. This is part of our conversation, edited for brevity.
Tell me, what do beavers have to do with forest fires?
Beavers are ecosystem engineers who can quickly turn simple streams into thriving wetland ecosystems. By doing so, they greatly increase surface water storage and soil water storage for landscaping.
During wet periods, the ground around beaver ponds fills with water like a large sponge. Then during droughts, the plants that live near beaver ponds can access the water stored in those earthen sponges and stay green and healthy, even if the droughts are long and intense. Because the vegetation around beaver ponds is protected against drought stress, it is relatively flammable.
When a wildfire starts, that fire will take the path of least resistance and burn quickly through the dry vegetation. The beaver wetlands and the vegetation within are quite wet, so the fire either skirts around or stalls, and sometimes even blows on them. As a result, beaver compounds remain green while the rest of the landscape burns.
You made a really cool stop motion video showing how beavers can help with wildfires. What inspired you to do this? What was the response?
I made a Stop-Motion video because I was in the middle of applying for jobs and had given my “elevator speech” about my research like 100 times and always found myself wishing I had a visual to go with it. I had this very clear mental picture of how beavers were helping wildfires, but just describing it verbally didn’t have the effect I would have liked. I couldn’t find any images that expressed the goal the way I wanted it, so I decided to make my own! I’d never made a stop motion video before, and honestly thought maybe the rest of the beaver researchers thought it was cool when I posted it on Twitter, but that’s about it. I was really surprised to see how quickly it went viral online and how many people were watching and commenting on it. It’s still my greatest network tool. This 45-second video, hot glue, and construction paper has resulted in more collaborations, more partnerships, and more interest in my research than any paper or presentation I’ve ever given.
What does your research show about beavers and wildfires?
My research shows that rivers and streams with beaver dams burn three times less often than similar rivers and streams without beaver dams.
I’ve also looked to see if this effect persists in giant fires (which are becoming more common with climate change), and in one study I found that 89% of beaver dam areas served as fire shelters – meaning they didn’t burn, or only very low-intensity burning . Only 60% of river landscapes devoid of beavers were fire shelters, and only 37% of nearby hillsides and non-river environment were fire shelters. So resisting a beaver-driven fire has a really lasting effect—beaver complexes are uniquely hard to burn.
What is the current beaver population in the US/North America, and how does it compare with historical beaver populations?
The current beaver population is about 10% of the historical population in North America. Before the fur trade, there were 100-400 million beavers on this continent. Overexploitation during the fur trade drove the beavers almost to extinction—their population has dropped to around 100,000. Today, we estimate that there are 10-40 million beavers here. Some places, such as the Rocky Mountains, have seen a significant resurgence in their beaver populations and many streams are in or near their beaver capacity. Other places, like most of California for example, still have far fewer beaver populations than in the past and a long way to go to recovery.
How can understanding what beavers do help us understand how to better control or survive wildfires?
Climate change is a really big and complex challenge that we face. There is a lot of work to be done, and frankly sometimes it seems like there is a lot of work to be done on our own. The fire shelters that beavers create have very real value as the fire moves across the landscape. Not only can plants and animals survive safely in these beaver-designed landscape patches during fast-moving fires, but the physically complex wetlands also help capture and settle debris and ash that is carried into rivers after a fire.
Furthermore, understanding how beavers engineer their wetlands to be fireproof can help guide our fire management strategies in river corridors. We don’t have to solve all climate change challenges alone – working with nature and ecosystem engineers like beavers can be really powerful.
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