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

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.

The way I see it, yeah it's a drop in the ocean, but these individual sites will act as "seeds", safe havens for wildlife that, from there, can spread out far and wide. Like these fish, they don't stay there, they go far and wide and become part of a much bigger ecosystem. Part of the reason why these restoration projects are important is because at the time, people weren't aware (or didn't care) of the scale or impact their efforts in hunting beavers had. I'm sure the individual hunters also figured their hunting was a drop in the ocean.

With how low many wildlife populations are, surprisingly small areas can be ecologically important

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

Thank you for posting this.

And also for your simple, matter-of-fact tone.

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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.

Armchair theory: larger water surface from beaver lakes means larger evaporative surface means things cool down. Depends on the ambient temperature and amount of sunlight as well, of course.

Here's your link without the surveillance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XToPq9lsOM

I'd recommend Leila Philip's Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America. It's a great work of narrative science writing.

I think we deeply underestimate the profound impact beavers had on the landscape in North America. We truly live in a post-beaver geography. The beaver hat fad in Europe was the primary driver of their population going from hundreds of millions to less than 100,000.

https://www.leilaphilip.com/beaverland

Loads of projects being done for that (at least in Europe) after droughts have become more and more common. Netherlands especially, worldwide experts in water management because for hundreds of years they tried to actually get rid of the water; the whole country is full of infrastructure for managing the water table.

This year was bad in terms of drought, yet it seems it wasn't as bad as the one we had a few years ago (2018 or 19? I don't remember exactly) because they allowed the water table to go higher a bit, used the ijsselmeer as a giant fresh water reservoir, closed / limited locks, etc. After this year and the rapidly accellerating / worsening effects of climate change, like the drying out (ok, low water levels) of the Rhine, I'm sure they're working hard to do more. They can for example choose to allow the flood plains to flood even when there's no flooding, to (locally) add to the ground water. Granted, it takes (iirc) decades or hundreds of years for that to end up in the aquifers but better now than never.

Other projects I've heard of involve allowing rivers and streams to meander again, undoing the work of straightening them to get rid of water faster and / or optimize shipping traffic.

You will be amazed at how much local governments don't care about this. They actively try to remove water was fast as possible from an area.

>I have no idea why I am so obsessed by aquifer recharge.

Maybe humans have an instinct for water management like beavers do.

>There’s a fair number of greening the desert YouTube channels using Beaver Dam analogues funded by the state.

I enjoy some of these too. There's also water management focused regenerative agriculture projects that are cool like food garden pond systems in Hawaii[0]

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24uCCr3KjCI

They are doing that in a few places in the UK. It's working really well and they can rapidly transform the landscapes they are in. The flip side of course is that a lot of residential areas and farmland is in what used to be wetlands that are now drained on purpose. If you introduce beavers there, it tends to be a bit disruptive as they would cause issues with flooding areas that people would prefer to keep dry.

But done right, they help restore wetlands that absorb and retain water rather than causing lots of issues with flooding downstream when it rains. Wetlands have a lot of bio diversity, insects, birds, plants, predators, and all the rest. They also capture a lot of carbon All good stuff. Mostly the beavers take care of all of the heavy lifting of building dams and maintaining them. It's a lot cheaper than trying to emulate what they do with a lot of human labor. But of course keeping beavers confined to where you want them is maybe a bit hard. So, artificial dams are a good alternative.

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.

TFA implies the issue is land owners won’t allow it:

> But beavers can only thrive if landowners allow them to.

> 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.

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.

If you do even a moment of reading about salmon, you will find that they are extremely sensitive to warm temperatures. Even a couple degrees F above their "normal" will allow disease to run rampant.

There's more food, less energy wasted fighting excessively strong current, and more places to hide from predators. Water quality goes up downstream of a beaver(-ish) dam.

Cattail tubers and bark from smallish hardwood trees that they embed underwater for winter food. Hidden affect of that is the cattail is not particularly good habitat or food source for waterfowl so then you have one more item pushing down on waterfowl populations.

That was my thought too. Nothing in an ecosystem exists in isolation. Change a single variable, especially a dramatic change like going from 8% to 60% on a single variable, and there will be ripple effects throughout the local ecosystem. The Law of Unintended Consequences is one of those unchangeable, eternal laws that when you forget them, the Gods of the Copybook Headings limp up to explain it once more*.

* https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_copybook.htm for anyone who doesn't recognize the reference in that last sentence. Most people will, I hope, but there's always the lucky 10,000. (https://xkcd.com/1053/)

> I am sick of underachieving beavers. Go us!

This really made laugh for some reason, just imagining a beaver typing away at HN specifically.

I just... don't like comments like these; it's so much cheaper, easier and better to either have humans build one (out of biodegradeable materials like in the article) or reintroduce beavers. But instead of allocating some money for that, people allocate millions/billions to build robots that can't do the job as well.

Been there. Done that. Even attended the “spawn till you die” festival in ‘98 but all I got was a stupid t-shirt.