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The very little critters that we came and trapped that we nearly
pushed to extinction may hold the keys
to helping with some of our biggest water resources
challenges.
We face major problems moving forward
with diminishing snowpacks and climate change and major water
resources challenges.
We have a very simple question.
Could beaver potentially compete with a declining snowpack?
A lot of our research is focused on trying
to address and quantify that very question.
The location of Utah's State couldn't be any better
for researching beaver.
There are historic beaver dams throughout the tributaries
of Logan river.
We take visiting professors out, we take courses there,
and we use it for our own research.
The perfect place to test and validate
our beaver dam capacity model.
We developed some network modeling tools that basically
model all 25,000 kilometers of streams in the state of Utah,
and we modeled their capacity to support this dam building
activity by beaver.
We know that there's a lot more additional capacity
to support beaver dams.
The next step is to try and quantify
what that will do to the hydrology.
What beaver dams do is they fundamentally
alter the delivery of water, sediment, and nutrients
by slowing it down, giving it places to infiltrate.
Creates a mosaic of habitats that are important for birds,
for fish, for plant species.
The deposits that are behind these beaver dam,
most people think that they're just filled with pines and mud,
but in fact, they're filled with a big mixture of grain sizes.
If I'm a cutthroat trout looking for good places to spawn,
a lot of times these old beaver dams
that have filled to the brim with sediment
change from that sort of slow energy environment
into a higher energy environment.
This creates wonderful spawning gravels.
Beaver dams over thousands and thousands of years
have been built, they've filled up with sediment,
and they've built this valley bottom up.
And the sediments that they filled this thing up with
are the perfect sponge.
And so the real storage from beaver dams
is not in the ponds, it's by raising these water tables
and then saturating and flooding that whole valley bottom,
and they slowly release it out over the long hot summer.
Beavers can provide some of the benefits
that we obtained by building reservoirs,
but it can be done in a much more subtle, cheap way that's
not going to have as large an impact on the landscape.
Large reservoirs tend to disrupt the natural environment,
the flow of nutrients and water and biota.
Beaver dams are naturally part of the system.
The plants and animals have coevolved with them,
and they provided these ecosystem services
for millennia.
If you look at all the streams and rivers in the west,
a huge proportion of them intersect very productive
rangelands.
And so we've had some very promising collaborations
with ranchers that they've noticed in their lifetime,
since beavers have been trapped out
of some of the streams on their ranches and on their allotments
that the streams half in size and they go dry every summer.
Whereas they used to have perennial
flow when they had beaver in them.
And so they're interested in getting that more reliable
year-round water source and feeding the valley bottom
and getting better forage production for their cattle.
There's proposals on the table right now
to put major reservoirs and start in era of dam building.
Those proposals come with incredibly huge price tag,
for fairly modest storage capacity,
and some incredible impacts ecologically and recreationally
to some of these systems.
Beaver restoration, we're talking about chump change.
You can employ this rodent to go out
and potentially do a lot of the work for you.
It does require some careful planning and some logistics,
but it's the sort of thing where we
think it's a much more viable, sustainable approach.
Thousands to tens of thousands of beaver dams
could be an alternative to say large, very expensive man made
dams.
I've been really privileged and excited to come to Utah State
and be able to work with other researchers
on water issues that just span a whole range of disciplines
from engineering to hydrology, to morphology, ecology.
We think our research can help solidify
this as a very serious and legitimate alternative.
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