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Welcome to Your Daily Dot where Dot will share tips, advice, and stories on how we can make our world better.
All Dear Dot illustrations by Elissa Turnbull.
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Dear Reader,
Dot has a soft spot for beavers. Not only are they adorable (and iconically Canadian, like Dot!), but also, they are talented eco-engineers who have long been wrongly maligned as “nuisances.”
Now, these nuisances are being put to work in New Mexico, where the fallout from a 2011 fire was still wreaking havoc on the ecosystem. When traditional restoration methods failed, the “most skilled construction workers of the animal kingdom,” were brought in, reads a Sierra Club story.
Specifically … beavers. “These beavers are ecosystem engineers and much better at restoration than we are,” one natural resources manager explained.
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Beavers were rounded up, including from areas where landowners found them nuisances and wanted them relocated. The beavers were then hiked into the release site in Frijoles Canyon. “After the Las Conchas Fire removed vegetation and created water-repelling soils that caused destructive flash floods, the beaver dams helped fundamentally change how water moved through the canyon,” the story tells us. “Instead of rapid runoff and channel entrenchment, the beaver dams slowed water flow and allowed groundwater to saturate the surrounding soils. As a result, the ecosystem is now better at retaining water both during flash floods and drought periods. It’s a huge step in restoring the natural hydrological function of the region that took a hit when beavers were originally trapped en masse in the 1800s.”
Similar tales are playing out around the world, including in the UK, where beavers were hunted to near extinction but are now being reintroduced to restore degraded ecosystems.
Want to know more about this climate superhero? Check out Bluedot contributor Jackie Davis’s Wild Facts About Beavers.
Long live the beaver, says Dot!
Eagerly,
Dot
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