THE BEAVER EPISODE (finally!) with Dr. Emily Fairfax and Dr. Sophie Gilbert

About 90% of beaver wetlands are fire refugio, so they're going to be completely unburnt or just a little bit singed around the edges. This is holding true even in some of our narliest megafires, like what burned through Colorado in 2020. These are fires that hop the continental divide. These are fires that spread 100,000 acres in a day, and the beaver wetlands are just not burned. And you go and visit these in the field that there's otters sunbathing on top of the beaver lodge and the pond is absolutely full of fish and there's deer and I get charged by moose because they're just hanging out there and they are so incredibly alive when the rest of the landscape is so incredibly dead that it's shocking and it feels almost like fake. It's like how could they have withstood this? Like I'm looking at the hills open every tree is burnt to nothing like there's holes in the ground where there used to be roots. That's how intense the fire was. And yet here's this beaver wetland as if it was protected by some big magical bubble. But it's not. It's just protected by the beavers doing what they've done from 7 and a half million years that they've been building dams and engineering the landscape and it's such a powerful force. Hello and welcome to Life with Fire podcast. The podcast that explores our relationship with wildfire and how we can better coax us with it in the future. I'm your host Amanda Monty. I'm sure by now you've heard about the initiative to bring beavers into the Idaho backcountry by parachuting them in with leftover parachutes from World War II. This happened in the 1940s and they ended up placing about 75 beavers in boxes and dropping them out of planes into a watershed in the Frank Church wilderness in Central Idaho. The purpose of the initiative was to relocate beavers from newly urbanized areas back into the Idaho backcountry. In the 80 or so years since this initiative and this idea were conceptualized, we've learned quite a bit about the impacts that beavers can have on these landscapes and how devastating beaver trapping had been on mountain meadows across the west as well as just meadows and wetlands across North America. Prior to colonization, North America would have been pocketed with wetlands. It would have been a continent defined by wetlands if you will and most of those wetlands would have been a result of beaver activity. So while I won't go into this too deeply, I think it's worth repeating that colonization had a massive impact on beaver populations, really staggering, really detrimental and that ended up having long lasting impacts on ecological health across the west, across the continent, and mountain meadows in prairies, in anywhere else that would have historically been a wetland, which as far as we know would have been quite a bit of the North American continent. So on the vast list of things that beavers provide to ecosystems, wildfire resilience is just one item on that list. Others range from improved water storage, which improves habitat and drought resilience, as well as critical habitat for a whole laundry list of species from steelhead and native trout to riparian plants to elk and other large game. I actually ended up having an opportunity to go watch some folks from Trot and Limited and the Northwest Youth Corps build beaver dam analogs in a river in central or even last summer. I just wrote a story about it for Patagonia, which I'm going to link in this episode's show notes. The reason I'm bringing this up is because it was really cool to see firsthand one of these management strategies that we have to bring beavers back into mountain meadows in these ecosystems that have been degraded over years and years, decades and decades, if not centuries, of poor management practices. Things like logging, grazing, obviously beaver trapping, high intensity wildfire as a result of logging and replanting and things like that. So I got to witness firsthand these folks building these BDAs. They can build them fairly fast. Within an hour or two, you can have a BDA built and within a couple days you can have 12 or 13 along the length of a stream. So it was really cool to see them doing that work, getting it done pretty effectively, and also being able to see the impacts from last year's crew, the crew that had done that same work in 2022 had actually drawn a beaver back into that watershed. And so when we came and checked out this creek on day one in 2023, we were able to see that beavers had actually taken over some of the previous summer's BDAs. That's what they're called beaver gaming logs. We were able to see that these beavers had come in and had improved a lot of those BDAs that had been built to the extent that some of them were 40 or 50 feet across and you know when they build them, they're only maybe five or six feet across. And we were standing at times in like three and a half feet of water in areas that have not been under water the previous summer. And so it's really, it was very clear, it's very obvious how much impact these things have, this management strategy. It's considered a nature-based intervention, you know, where you're coming in and you're doing something, but you're hoping that it will be discovered by a beaver and that beaver will kind of take up shop and make it his own their own and set up shop for the long term and hopefully keep that watershed healthy for the long term. So the reason I'm talking so much about beavers right now is obviously because of this episode about beavers, but also because this has been a topic that we've wanted to explore in the podcast for a long time and I'm so glad that we're finally able to do it. And it's just kind of a perfect time because I did just finish reporting that story and writing that story. And it was just released a few weeks ago and so this is kind of front of mind for me and it was also really special to actually be able to see what a beaver restored landscape looks like. So I have like this vision of what that actually looks like and how humans can actually sort of encourage those processes through the building of BDAs and seeing one of our best management strategies that we have available to us to bring beavers back into a landscape. Seeing that firsthand was really important to me and it made me feel as though I had better questions to ask of the experts that I brought on for this episode and also that I had better context and I was able to sort of better understand what these processes look like and how beavers can really encourage them. So I feel like this was a perfect time to do this episode. I'm really excited to release it. We brought in two of like the foremost experts in this space. The first is if you're in the fire space, especially you've probably heard of her Dr. Emily Fairfax, who is an assistant professor of geography at the University of Minnesota and very likely the foremost expert on how beaver dams change landscapes and improve their resilience to wildfire and other climatic threats, drought and floods and things like that. She is fantastic and I will link to a few bits of her work in the episodes show notes. And then our second guest today is Dr. Sophie Gilbert, who is the lead scientist for biodiversity for vibrant planet, which creates planning tools to help decision makers prioritize treatment areas and assess wildfire risk. In this case that means prioritizing areas where beavers might be most useful and impactful, whether that's in mountain meadows or kind of closer to where humans habitat themselves. Both Emily and Sophie spoke to the role that beavers can play in habitat restoration. We heard about the ways that beavers can help with wildfire resilience. We heard about actual examples of beaver restored habitats actually serving as really solid fuel breaks on active wildfires. We heard about both Emily and Sophie's individual work in this space, which is fascinating and super interesting and I will link to some of their research that's related to this topic in the show notes for this episode. And finally, on top of everything else, they told a number of fantastic beaver jokes. There were some beaver puns tossed in throughout. And chatting with them for about an hour really just confirmed that beavers are the unsung heroes of climate and wildfire resilience and we need to be utilizing them way more than we are. And a lot of people are making strides towards making that happen and trying to get this work done. So quick shout out to all the people out there building BDAs and trying to restore beaver habitat and just building those wetlands that we can hopefully use to improve our fire resilience and watershed resilience in the future. So with all that being said, with all of that introductory material in context, let's get into our episode finally with Dr. Emily Fairfax and Dr. Sophie Gilbert. I hope you enjoy this episode. I really enjoyed recording it and thanks for listening. Welcome you guys. Super excited to have you. Let's just get a quick introduction from each of you. We can start with Sophie actually. Yeah, hi. I'm Sophie Gilbert. I'm the lead biodiversity scientist for an organization called Vibrant Planet where we build decision analytics for land managers to help figure out when, where, and what they should do to mitigate their climate risks. And so doing a lot of work on threatened and endangered species but also species like beavers that provide a lot of ecosystem services downstream of them, if you will. And then beavers are extra cool because they can actually help mitigate climate risks directly themselves, which I'm sure Emily will get into. Yeah, so I'm Emily Fairfax and I'm an assistant professor of geography at the University of Minnesota and I also work with the San Anthony Falls Lab here. I've been studying beavers and their role in a changing climate for about the last decade. There's all sorts of things that beavers can do and I feel like we're still just scraping the surface. Even though I'm 10 years in, I'm confident I have a whole career of this ahead of me. Awesome. That's exciting. Okay, so you're 10 years in, Emily. And Sophie, you're kind of building your beaver understanding and context through your work with Vibrant Planet. I'm hoping to just get like a beaver 101. Like how are beavers building resilience, whether it's climate resilience, wildfire resilience, obviously those are both kind of synonymous in some ways. But can you just talk a little bit about those processes and why we should care about beavers in this conversation and this wildfire space especially? Yeah, so I can jump in on beavers 101. So beavers are both a keystone species and an ecosystem engineer. Being a keystone species means that when they are living in and modifying an ecosystem, a lot of other species depend on them and the way that they modify it to create themselves a home. So beavers make a home for themselves, but they also make a home for all sorts of other plants and animals. The ecosystem engineer, that's because beavers are really quite good at modifying the physical environment. So they're second only to us and their ability to come in and change their surroundings to suit their needs better. When beavers are doing that, what that usually looks like is they move into streams or river corridors and start to build dams. And those dams are leaky structures that are going to slow water down. They don't stop it. It does slow down though. And gives it time to sort of sink out into the soil. It pulls a little bit behind the dam that initiates the creation of a wetland. And then beavers keep working on that dam. And they dig canals that radiate out from these ponds across the floodplain to the valley bottom, really expanding their area of influence. And in a very short amount of time, like on the order of weeks to months or maybe a year or so, beavers can transform a single thread of river channel into a large sprawling wetland. And it's that wetland that's home to all these other species that makes them a keystone species, but it's the beavers ability to create that change that makes them an ecosystem engineer. That was so good. I know you've done this before. I was like, I just want that to feel that you probably give every other media person that calls and asks you about these things. Some of the things that have made them bring compelling for us to include in our decision analytics are all of the downstream ecosystem services and those huge values to society. So, you know, Emily already touched on habitat and biodiversity, kind of provisioning of habitat for other creatures, but, you know, they can also sequester depending on the configuration. A lot of carbon as sediment behind their dams. They're growing new, riparian veg and helping restore that riparian for a structure that can also sequester a lot of carbon, nutrient cycling, water cleaning, non-consumptive and conceptive recreation, you know, trout habitat. All these just really hugely valuable things that come when you get high functioning wetlands back onto the landscape. Yeah, that's fantastic. There's a joke in the river community that if you have a problem, there's a beaver for that. That might be taking a little bit far, but it is really true. Like, the diversity of services that beavers provide is really quite remarkable and not like many other species out there. Like, they are really touching all sorts of spheres that matter under a changing climate and their influence on it is across the board quite beneficial for us. They're very valuable Keystone species and ecosystem engineers. Maybe we should stop calling things that are magical, stop calling them unicorns and start calling them beavers. I like it. Now, you know, problems and beavers can solve all of them. That's awesome. I was telling Emily, I went to the headbottles of the John Day for BDA. First story I was writing about BDAs that were being built for salmon and steelhead habitat in that area. And I was like, it's just wild to think even that far from the ocean that it's creating habitat for, you know, the salmon and steelhead species. So that's just another added benefit for the anglers. And I wanted to know a little bit more about vibrant planets role in all of this. I know it's like heavily in sort of the prioritization of treatment areas, but a lot of folks were asking I throughout like a little poll to my audience to see what their questions were for you guys. And there were a lot of questions about management and like how, you know, land managers can be thinking about this and how we can be improving habitat for beavers. And I'm wondering if there's an element that you can speak to in terms of what vibrant planets doing and like how that maybe relates back to agencies or how it might be helping agencies. Yeah, absolutely. I think Emily's going to have a really awesome perspective on beaver restoration potential and, you know, upsides and downsides of that. But vibrant planet, we basically help people much more quickly get to the collaboration stage of lay and management planning, which is you're dealing with these really complicated places where humans and nature touch these social ecological systems. And they're not only complicated because ecosystems are complicated. They're also complicated because people are complicated. And often a lot of what's limiting action is not really a data problem. It's a people problem. And so basically we let people have an agreed upon place, this online platform where they can go and they can visualize the things they care about, probably speaking we work with human assets, things that enhance human safety in the case of wildfire or other natural disasters, key recreation sites, key biodiversity assets, water and above ground carbon. Those are kind of the big flavors of things we work with and with each of those we have, you know, locally varying stacks of stuff from beaver habitat to a local endemic species that only found right there to the local hospital. And basically stakeholders can come in to this decision platform, slide some sliders around to express their values, you know, not everyone cares equally about the same things, telling people what to care about doesn't really work. You have to actually honor and let them express their values. And then when stakeholders have come in and express their values, they can then automatically compare to each other, which projects are generated as a result. And look for consensus. There's a big green button that says look for consensus, which is my favorite button. And it turns out that even if let's say Suzanne comes in and prioritizes human assets and safety and doesn't really care that much about biodiversity and cares a little bit about recreation and she generates her set of optimized projects for that landscape. Another user, you know, Jorge comes in and he really cares about beavers and biodiversity and water and carbon and maybe doesn't care as much about some of the other stuff, you know, everyone's different. But when they come in and they look at their overlapping values, they actually end up finding typically quite a bit of overlap more than you might expect because people also care about a lot of the same things. The environment is what it is. And so basically we let people skip what has traditionally been, you know, a multi-year planning process and get straight to the hard conversations about competing values and trade-offs and what should we all do together? How are we going to decide? And then we're also working with the US Forest Service and US Fish and Wildlife Service right now on some really cool pilot work. I'm very passionate about streamlining environmental permitting, but in a very data-driven, pro-environment way. You know, where you're taking the best available science and the best available data, combining it with, you know, a high quality engineered platform to generate impact assessment for endangered species that streamlines into permitting just much, much faster. But same data and ideally improved data. So how can we not only plan faster, get the collaboration faster, but also get to permitting and then action faster? Because we just do not have time. Basically our mission is to speed up these very complex, traditionally very slow processes, but in ways that are very data-driven and science-driven and incorporate the best available insights from people like Emily and others. Well, that's fascinating. I have a few more questions about that, but I'd like to hear what Emily has to say as well here. I mean, I have about a million things to say about beavers and beaver-based restoration and working with them. I think that one thing that I always like to come back to is that there used to be a lot more beavers on this continent. Before the fur trade, there was somewhere between 100 and 400 million beavers in North America and for a little bit of perspective, that's about one beaver for every kilometer of habitable stream. They were everywhere. And the fur trade took them down to about 100,000, so we were very, very close to losing beavers altogether. And in terms of geologic and ecological time, to lose that many beavers that are each individually that powerful in the landscape, in the span of about 100 years, this is like a massive disturbance on the landscape. And suddenly, probably over a billion beaver dams started to degrade and break down, and the rivers were fundamentally changed. The landscapes are fundamentally changed. Today, beaver populations have rebounded to about 10 to 30 million, so it sounds like a lot, but it's only 10% of the historic population. And when I think about beaver restoration and beaver conservation and working with them in support of climate change adaptation mitigation, the potential there is huge because we are still so beaver-deficient in this continent. And if we had a billion or more dams, and maybe we have like 100 million dams now for lucky, that's still a lot. A lot of room for growth, and that's a lot of room for carbon storage and fire mitigation and drought mitigation and flood wave attenuation and biodiversity. And every individual point of restoration matters. But I think from what I've seen in my own research and some other folks' research, where we're doing it matters a lot too. There are places like the headwaters of the Colorado that desperately need more beavers in them, the benefits of them there at this moment in time with these climate stressors is probably larger than it is in some other places where bringing back beavers is quote unquote right. We're there in greater abundance in the past, but we have an opportunity right now to be sort of synergistic engineers and think about where beavers have lived historically and then use our own brains to figure out where if they were back today, would it mean the most for us and then work towards that goal and try to optimize that because like Sophie said, we did not have a whole lot of time and we don't really need to dodle and dry out every aspect of restoration. If we know it works and we have a good spot for it, I oftentimes say like just put the log or the wood in the water or put the beaver in the water and let's go. Like let's not dodle on this. Yeah, and let them take it from here too. That's like the beauty of this is that it's just like kind of going to compound on itself once you reintroduce those beavers or once you get that habitat restored. Sophie I'm curious, where you guys are primarily working? Like what are your sort of areas of where this is working for you or where you're seeing a lot of success in this collaborative approach that you're taking? Yeah, so at this point, the decision and a political tool, which is called land tender, is deployed across just under 30 million acres in the Western US. And by the end of this year, it should be on around 50 million acres. So it's on a really diverse, broad array of landscapes. We're also exploring internationally and thinking about expanding west the Mississippi too. But right now we're really focused on kind of the arid fire prone west. And we've had a lot of success teaming up with folks around the wildfire crisis strategy, which is forest service led, but usually includes a lot of other people as well because wildfires do not care about national forest borders. And they jump over into human communities and onto state land and onto tribal land and other land designation. So there are these big, big defined landscapes all across the west. So for example, we're working in the front range of Colorado, in Chianton Circle, all over different parts of California, which is where we got our start, Southern and Central Oregon, just really a lot of places this point Idaho. It's big and growing list of places, but they're all united by kind of their complexity and their level of climate induced risk, wildfire risk specifically. You come into these communities or was there like an express interest from the community first or did you recognize that there was that sort of complex wildfire risk there? Yeah. So the wildfire crisis landscapes are predefined by federal level policy makers. Oh, gotcha. But we do also work with actual community level folks via community wildfire protection planning, which is a much more localized fine scale set of plans that people make to do fuels reduction treatments around communities to protect the things people care about most. We also work with utilities, increasingly starting to explore working with insurers, basically anyone exposed to climate driven risk who might want to actually do something about it in an efficient way. Oh, that's fantastic. Yeah. Awesome. I'm going to circle back to some forest management practices. A lot of my audience are land managers and firefighters who are kind of working up in their career into positions where they might have that ability to do some broader land management, some landscape level kind of resilience projects. And so I'm curious. You know, I know about BDAs. I don't know if my audience knows a ton about BDAs, but maybe we can talk about that or we can talk about other sort of practices that can be used or that are traditionally used to build better fever habitat or to bring beavers back. We're not air dropping beavers into these mountain meadows anymore. Actually, I know that. I don't know why that was ever ended, but anyway, what does that look like? What does management practices look like? It's definitely not air dropping anymore. And it was ended because it's not a good way to move beavers. There's better ways to move them if you have to move them. Much of like 50s thing for us to do though, right? I totally was. I don't know when that happened, but it was just so like 40s, 50s mindset of like, yeah, we can just air drop them in, right? That's got to be pretty efficient. Mm-hmm. Honestly, it worked better than you might expect. Like as an Idaho, and I'm kind of proud that we kind of made it work. Yeah, it was a very creative effort. It was late 40s, and it was trying to solve a lot of problems at once, which they did to do pretty effectively. This was run in Idaho as well as in California. They were getting beavers from more urban areas or places where there was conflict, and then utilizing surplus parachutes from the end of World War II to do conservation and use that equipment in a way that was interesting for some folks at the Fish and Wildlife or Fish and Game departments. And they just dropped the beavers into the mountain meadows where they could do good. And if you read the documents and sort of materials that these different departments put out, like they were very clear acknowledging that this relocation work was to restore mountain meadows and to store water and to provision for biodiversity and to help agriculture urban areas in a more indirect way. So this is not about using beavers as our partners is not particularly new, although there are a number of ways that we do it today that none of them are about parachutes anymore. We do relocate beavers still, and that is an evolving process in science, and there's a lot of ways that beavers have been relocated in the past, and are still relocated today that do not always result in high success rates. They are a pretty sensitive species. They have tight family groups. So when we move beavers around, you do have to move the whole family. You do have to do it at a specific time of the year because beavers follow a very tight annual cycle of different building activities and food storing activities. So that's something that we do, but it's not actually our first choice when we're trying to work with beavers. Instead, it's a lot easier to lure them to a site using something like the Beaver Dam Analog or BDA, which are basically fake beaver dams that we build. And in perhaps the ultimate criticism from beavers, they see a BDA. And they're like, wow, the beavers who built this must be long gone. This is an abandoned and kind of crappy structure. Despite us doing our best to mimic them, we're really trying to make this a beaver dam. And beavers are very certain that it is not a beaver dam and that they are totally okay to take them over. So when beavers are two to three years old, especially in their out dispersing to become their own beaver and start a new family on their own, they're looking for habitat that's in decent enough quality and doesn't have existing beavers added. They're pretty territorial. But even better if they can find an old beaver dam because that's a sign that this site has been useful before and it gives them a bit of a plug up when they're trying to get started building. They see a BDA and they're like, I can settle here. And that's the way we can kind of guide them to the sites that we want them to be at. This only works if you have beavers within dispersing distance, which is anywhere from 10 kilometers to 100 kilometers. It's a pretty big radius. And if you don't have beavers in the watershed, that's where relocation really starts to shine. Sometimes though, streams are not even in a place where we can put in a beaver dam analogue. They are too degraded. And in those situations, you might try a number of other what are called low tech process based restoration strategies, including putting in post assisted log structures or pals. They look like broken beaver dams. Usually they don't channel span all the way. They just go part way of cross the river channel. The goal of those is to cause both erosion and deposition. You're trying to get streams out of these sort of stable and sized states back into more complex channel forms where you can start to build up a riparian ecosystem and make it at least somewhat suitable for beavers. All of that being said, beavers are pretty tough and resilient. And they decide where they want to be for better or for worse. And so you might have the nicest BDA site all built up. And then a beaver decides to go live in a drainage ditch or in an urban spillway or in all sorts of different places. So it's a challenge. Like they are a sentient creature that is making choices about where to settle and we don't fully understand them. But we do understand the kinds of things that they like. And we can try to design our streams and work with our streams to be more favorable to beaver to bring them back so that they can start working on their own volition. They're great engineers, but they are not on a contract. They are making their own decisions as they go. They don't submit blueprints or ask for permits. They just do. And that's one of the reasons they're so powerful, but it's also one of the reasons they're kind of challenging to work with sometimes. Yeah, I don't have a background working with beavers, but I am a wildlife biologist. And one of my friends did his master's degree on juvenile dispersing beavers in the Rocky Mountains. And this is back in the day, so kind of clunky equipment, but he fit them with VHF backpacks and follow them. You know, lots of midnight telemetry for him to kind of track these beavers, but he recorded them going up and over mountain passes in the Rockies, which is just amazing to think about, you know, these teenage beavers, you know, you look at a beaver and they're not, they don't look like they're going to be amazing hikers. You know, that's like not their body type. They've got beautiful web feet and this beautiful tail that is great for swimming, but they do not look like they're going to thrive on the trail. And I'm sure lots of them died in that effort, you know, at a dangerous time of life for any animal with dispersal phase. But just the fact that that is their instinct is to go climb up and over, go find a new watershed, go settle in a new place. I don't know what a powerful restoration mechanism potentially. Totally. Just sleeper endurance athletes beavers. Totally. Who would have ever expected it. Actually, I'm curious to know, I think both of you probably have some insights here, but what are some barriers to these restoration techniques? You know, like BDAs, it feels like that's a fairly simple process. Actually, I went out and watched some folks building BDAs and I was like, you know, you can build a BDA an hour and you can build 12 in a couple days. And then you've got, you know, a stream that's more or less ready for hopefully a beaver to come back in and kind of take up shop and do its thing. But I'm curious what those common barriers are. I hope that I imagine years are going to be probably different from Emily's, like maybe that institutional barrier versus, you know, the actual on the ground barriers or whatever that might be. One of the biggest barriers that I see is permitting and sort of getting enough people on board to make the stream messy and chaotic. A lot of folks are very comfortable being by streams that are simple, that you don't have a ton of vegetation making it all scragly. It's not muddy, it's not stinky. And so much of wetland restoration and beaver restoration is introducing chaos back into the system in a big way. It's not just build one beaver dam analog and call it good. Like the goal is to make broads, brawling, valley sized wetlands and getting the buy-in on that and then getting that permitted to fundamentally change the hydrology of that system can be hard. Even if you can say it with the utmost confidence, this is what it was 200 years ago. This is what it was 300 years ago. This is what it was for 10,000 years before the fur trade. It can still be hard to get the OKs to make it that way again. Once you have all the OKs, there's almost always some sort of funding available through different environmental programs or nonprofit work. And there's always hands available. People really are emotionally and personally invested in these efforts for good reason. Like, one of the few ways you can feel individually like you're affecting our climate future in a good way. And I don't see there being a lack of enthusiasm at all. It's really at least what I've seen a lot of the spin up and getting it approved to go in and fundamentally change the meadow or change the river from what it's been for 200 years to what it was for the 10,000 before that. Yeah. And just to piggyback on what Emily's saying, totally agree with that. I think when you're a land management decision maker, you're listening to all of these different voices from across the landscape, human voices. And when we took beavers out of the system and simplified these floodplains into much more anti-channelized streams, we didn't just leave the rest of the ground alone. We colonized it. Both we and beavers are colonial. And Western settlers took advantage of that really beautiful fertile water available land. It's some of the very best human habitat today in terms of the arid west. It's where you can successfully do agriculture. It's where people put down ranches and homesteads during that era and today. And so putting beavers back means coming up with compromises with the humans they're sharing habitat with. And that's hard. And I think a lot of land management decision makers until relatively recently didn't see why it was worth it. He wasn't clear. But I think as the climate is changing, as we're facing more drought and more water still casticity and scarcity, folks in that ranching and agricultural community, it's not like everyone's universally rolling out the green welcome mat for beavers. But there's a lot more openness to nature-based solutions, including beavers, I think, than there used to be. And including some strong voices with positive experiences from within some of these ranching communities who've seen, for example, that beaver can make their pasture lands and ag lands a lot more resilient during droughts and a lot more water stored in the system. So I think we're just starting to build up the evidence and the within communities trusted voices who have solutions and positive stories to share. Because it takes time for that knowledge body to build up in these communities. I feel like we're at the point where land managers are more open to the idea than they would have been 10 years ago. And in large part, that's because some of their most powerful stakeholder voices are more open to it than they would have been 10 years ago. But actually kind of relays into my next question pretty well, although you've kind of already answered it. I was going to try to talk to reintroducing beavers, or rather just trying to encourage folks to want to coexist with beavers in the woe space. And what kind of opportunities might exist there for fire resilience, because with beavers, with the assistance of beavers, taking it down to that private landowner scale, basically. I don't know if you can speak to that, basically just talking to that private landowner scale. When I have spoken to private landowners about beavers, it's changed a lot in the last 10 years, the attitudes towards beaver and the willingness of people to consider them more than just a pest. One of the things that I have really noticed is that people see beavers as a way to protect their own property and their own land and their own interests. And I think there's been, especially in the context of wildfire, a lot of frustration with state and federal fire management not being enough. And every year feeling like you're at the mercy of the weather forecast. And you don't know if this fire is just going to burn through your property and destroy everything. And you get guidance here about making a defensible space. But then the fire comes in, the whole town's are wiped off the map. And it's like, you feel very powerless. And then beavers, as goofy as it sounds, are like a source of power for people because beavers come into the land and they slow water down and they keep it on your property. And they make wetlands that there is plenty of evidence are a fire resistant and enough wetlands and used can start to build up fire breaks or you can build up fire refugio where you can drive your cattle to these ponds during fire and they don't all burn. For a lot of folks, there's nothing else giving them that opportunity. It's very hard in the west to get permitted for things like a retention pond or other ways to store water on your land. But when it's a natural process, when the river's coming back to life on its own, that's something that you can work with and support. And all of the secondary benefits that come with it, the biodiversity, having water fell there if you're a hunter, it really starts to cascade in spiral and that's when people realize, yes, I wanted this beaver originally to get me a little bit of fireproof land. And now that it's here, I'm starting to see like, there is more soil water. I don't have to pump as much groundwater. The groundwater wells are higher. There's a lot more life on my property. This is a really different space and I like it. So I've really started to see that pick up, but it's not everyone yet. I think in my own experience, people who've seen this are very onboard and people who just hear about it are very suspicious still because it does sound weird. Like you're talking about like an 80 pound rodent walking under your property and taking control and that being a good thing. And it's totally valid to be like, I am not on board with this. But then you see it on your neighbor's land and where you see them get an extra water allotment because they've done so much groundwater restoration through supporting beaver that they get permitted for more water and you're like, shoot, this is serious. Like I should also get on board with this. Yeah, those are great stories. I would just add that I think there's also opportunities to turn the dial up via policy change that could help individual landowners feel even better. Be more willing to experiment and adopt. Just we've done a lot with payment for ecosystem services in the US, but we have not really paid for beavers much yet. I mean, there's what you were talking about Emily's fascinating. I had not heard about increased water allotments as a result of beaver contributions. Whatever you want to call that. I love it. But I think you could also more directly, there's lots of conflict mitigation programs. But studies show that paying people for losses they've suffered does not help them feel better in the same way that preemptively paying them for providing a positive good does. You think about livestock wolf conflict and payment for losses versus payments for tolerance. Anyway, so I think that's a lot we could learn from existing experiments around human wildlife conflict and payments that could potentially translate really nicely to beaver world. I love that. That was fantastic. I am curious if you have recent examples in your own work where a restored landscape with beavers being reintroduced in whatever way, whether they walked there themselves or they were reintroduced by humans, like any examples of those areas having mitigated or slowed fire effects, fire impacts in an area, preferably from the last couple years if possible. Yeah. So in Washington, I'm not sure which fire was off the top of my head, but I could look it out. There's wildfire burning and it was coming towards a big like recreation lodge and that lodge had quite a few beaver wetlands next to it. And so the firefighters in that area wanted to save this structure. It's big. It's part of the community. And what they did was they went to the beaver wetlands and they backburned off of it. So they made it a larger wider fire resistant area that ultimately did function as a firebreak and prevent that lodge from burning during this fire. And the beaver wetlands were selected very intentionally because this was already a wide fireproof area to widen it a little bit more was extra insurance against the coming fire. And it was faster. They didn't have a lot of time. They already had something to jump off of and so they used it. And if they had not had that line of beaver wetlands available, they would have had to do more mowing. They would have had to do more back burning. They would have probably had to have retardant on hand to make sure that the fire didn't get out of control. But this ring of beaver ponds was able to be part of a collaborative firefighting effort between the beaver and the people to save some structures and ultimately prevent loss of property and potentially loss of life. Yeah. And Emily, there's all of your amazing work with your collaborators showing beaver impacts on fire severity at scale, just fabulous work. Yeah. So we've looked at quite a few beaver wetlands across the American West. Overall, what we find is about 90% of beaver wetlands are fire refugio, so they're going to be completely unburnt or just a little bit singed around the edges. And this is holding true even in some of our narliest megafires, like what burned through Colorado in 2020. These are fires that spread 100,000 acres in a day. They create, you know, fire tornadoes and these absolutely horrific conditions. And the beaver wetlands again and again and again and again are just not burned. And you go and visit these in the field and there's like otters sunbathing on top of the beaver lodge and the pond is absolutely full of fish. And there's deer and I get charged by moose because they're just hanging out there. And in some ways, like they are so incredibly alive when the rest of the landscape is so incredibly dead in some of these places that it's shocking. And it feels almost like fake. Like I'm looking at the hills open every tree is burnt to nothing. Like there's holes in the ground where they used to be roots. How intense the fire was and yet here's this beaver wetland as if it was protected by some big magical bubble. But it's not. It's just protected by the beavers doing what they've done from seven and a half million years that they've been building dams and engineering the landscape and it's such a powerful force. Yeah. And I'll just add that likewise, we've been really excited to see beaver restoration efforts trying to unfold on top of landscapes where we work. So we work on a lot of landscapes that are beaver rich at vibrant planets, but also a lot of the places we're working in California. Like are right in the heart of where California state sponsored new kind of beaver restoration plans are unfolding. You know, just this last year, the MyDue Summit Consortium and CDFW released seven beavers in Plumas County. It's very exciting and they've got lots more planned. And that's right on top of existing fire and fuels mitigation planning efforts that we've helped lay out. And so I'm really excited to go back and work with those same stakeholders in a year or two and actually have the wetland complexes be there on a map and be bigger and start to talk to them about maybe how we could grow from there. Yeah, I was just thinking if we only we could extend those benefits of that riparian area to the broader terrestrial upland areas, like imagining a mountain meadow and just like if we can do some like fuels treatment and then it'll be a lot less fuel treatment than if you know that wetland wasn't healthy. But yeah, any adjacent fuels treatment projects that can scale those impacts or those benefits rather. That's really interesting. This is a listener question and it's rather specific, but how does fever activity alter conditions for intentional fire? So whether that's like managed wildfire or cultural burning or prescribed burning or fuels treatment or whatever, like how can they be maybe used in collaboration with each other or is that something that you've thought about or looked into or researched? There's quite a bit of knowledge within various indigenous communities about the intersection of beaver and wildfire and beaver and cultural fire and you can read books like beaver bison horse to hear stories about how beaver were part of this larger like bison and cultural burning process that was happening in the high plains to sustain all of the community and to maintain food stores and to maintain water stores in California. There's quite a bit of knowledge and history of doing burning in association with beaver wetlands because you thin the fuels and then you store the water and these are all synergistic processes. Every culture does it a little differently and has different goals and different processes for doing that. But the idea of intentional burning and beavers being together is quite an old one. Fantastic. Sounds like you need to do a beaver follow up episode with some folks who are traditional knowledge holders. Yeah, that would be fantastic. If you guys have actually recommendations for that or someone that would kind of be able to straddle both of those worlds, that'd be awesome. I've spoken to quite a few indigenous practitioners, but I've never spoken anybody about that beaver intersection at all. Okay, my only remaining question is your vision for like a world like that's just beautiful for beavers. Like what's your beaver Shangri-la? What is your vision for a fire adapted beaver laden world? Well, Amanda, that would be a Shangri-launch. Oh my god. Wow, that's beautiful. That might be the name of the episode. I think in my ideal beaver world, it's more about how we are interacting with beavers that's different. And I would love to see us come so far that we really, when we see beavers doing what they're doing, our first thought is how can we keep them here, how can we support them. And if for whatever reason that's not possible in place, I want that to be something that we don't want to do. Like we don't want to move the beaver. We don't want to trap the beaver out. We don't want to stop them from building dams here because our gut instinct is this is a good thing. And if we remove this, that harms us and our interests just as much as it harms the beaver. And I think right now some people have that mindset, but a lot of folks it's still like very cautious, very unsure about beavers and sort of like, oh, I'm taking a gamble with this animal. I'm kind of like risking it with this animal. And in my ideal world, where beavers are thriving, it's not necessarily a number of beavers or an acres of beavers. It's more just about beavers are allowed to be beavers. And the default assumption is that beavers being beavers is good and natural. And part of the world we live in, not something that we have to be so hesitant about. Yeah, I totally share that vision Emily. I would just say from a visual standpoint, I like to imagine flying over a landscape either in a plane or by satellite or at birds IVO, however you like to think about it. And just, you know, looking down on these arid landscapes that we love and call home and just seeing this kind of string of emerald jewels along all the suitable waterways. You're talking about a beaver for every kilometer. Sometimes more, sometimes less. And just what a more like lush and verdant future that would be, not just for beavers, but for humans and all of the other animals and plants that depend on them. While that was spectacular, great ending spot, I feel like if there's anything else you guys want to add in though that we didn't touch on, we'd love to hear about it. If anything came to mind while we were chatting that you didn't get to speak to. Yeah, I mean, I think it'd be so fun to dig deeper into kind of functional restoration and like the stewardship economy. I mean, there's a million threads you could pull here, but they're not, they're not just beaver flavored stewardship economy. Tell me about this. That peaked my interest. Yeah, I do often wonder, you know, I can imagine, you know, in the interim until we get there, maybe you pay people to tolerate beavers. You create incentives for beavers, you make permitting beaver restoration really easy. You put BDAs in a lot of places and hope that the beavers follow, you know, there's all these different pathways to try to get them back on landscape. But ultimately at some point we need beavers, fuel reduction, managing the ecosystem, reciprocal relationships with nature. We need those to all become self-sustaining. We need to shift how our system is working so that that is a viable livelihood because things are the way they are for really good reasons. You know, people are making the best choices they can for themselves and their families right now. And we need new choices that are viable for them. In my past life, I was a college professor teaching wildlife and ecosystem management and so many of the students who would come through my classroom at the undergraduate and graduate level just they so wanted to work outdoors and work in nature. And it was really sad to have to tell them that yes, you can do that, but also you're going to have to use a computer, those jobs are, there's often how people start their careers, but they don't pay that well. You're probably going to have to climb out of that hands on work into more kind of computer intensive, desk intensive work as you progress through your career. And I would love to not have to tell them that, right? How can we make a future where you know, humans crave connection with nature, I think. And so many more people would love to have these kinds of restoration and stewardship, labor jobs available to them if only they would pay. And so just leave it open ended, but how do we invent the economy and the society where that is a viable way of making a living for you and your family? That's fantastic. I've actually thought a lot about this recently. I've been calling it the resilience economy, which is weird because when you said stretch of economy, I was like, I feel like this is an adjacent concept. I'm into that too. Because it's like people really want resilience building activities in their everyday life as desk people where they're like going to CrossFit and they're like running ultra-marathons and like trying to find those things that are outdoors and build connection with their community. And then we also have this huge need for resilience building activities on the landscape. And I'm like, how can we bridge this gap between these two competing realities where we have desk jobs where we can't? We don't have the time or the resources to be able to volunteer on the weekends and all of this. Anyway, I would love to hear Emily's thoughts on this as well, actually. I think makes a lot of sense. Instead of lifting weights, it's hard work to do and it's not paid enough. And I know so many field techs that love it. But by the time they're 30, which is not even close to being old, like they are in pain and they're working super long hours because it's not paying well so they would rather put in a 16 hour day to make ends meet than to work like a very reasonable eight hour day every day doing your resilience activities and stretch activities. So I think that that's just a testament to how many people really, really want this. They are willing to put in actual back breaking labor and incredible hours to do this until they physically cannot anymore. And there have to be better ways to support this where they can make a reasonable wage and work reasonable hours and have appropriately sized teams to accomplish the tasks at hand because it's really important work. And I am very much a desk jockey when it comes to my research. I love my computer. I love my satellites. And I love how not painful it is for me to do it physically, say for a little bit of shrimp back going on. But like I can provide all the data in the world, but it doesn't change anything unless someone's at there actually doing it. And that's one of the reasons bevers have been so enticing is because they are built for this. They do do this and they aren't part of our capitalist society where they need to be paid. Like they just exist and they do it. But when we want to mimic the bevers and we want to work with the bevers, like we are talking about working with people that exist in a very different society and a different structure and the incentives that bevers have are not translating to people in a way that I think they probably could. So maybe we should mimic bevers then also find a way to like mimic the reward structures that bevers have where you put in the hours. You get the nice safe home to have your family if you want it and you live out your life in a happy comfortable place where you're safe. That's amazing. I love it. Bevers are so aspirational in so many ways. Like I love the footage from inside, you know, people BBC and other people put these you know, little cameras inside the beaver lodge. And I love for example that they cohabit with muskrats. They'll share their food with like a whole muskrat family that just lives in their lodge with them. I think we have a lot to learn from bevers. They're so anti-capitalist. They totally are. Have you seen the video of the muskrat that just shadows the bevers? Oh. Like it's a family of scrats that live inside the beaver's lodge and the beaver goes out about it's day and the muskrat is just like following behind it. And I just saw this last month in one of the reading groups I'm in somebody put it up on the screen. It was the sweetest thing like muskrats just following the beaver around like muskrats can chew up like cat tails and small sticks and bevers like taking down a tree and muskrats taking down like a cat tail. But they're both like working together and it's the sweetest thing and beaver seems like a little annoyed like an older brother might, but ultimately like they're working together even though they're quite different. So yeah, a lot to learn from bevers. Oh, so aspirational. I love this. Wow. I'm even more psyched on bevers now. My friends are going to be so annoyed with me after this. That was great. Thanks for bringing that up. I feel like that added a lot. I hadn't heard anybody else talk about, you know, that stewardship economy thing concept that you mentioned. So that was really interesting to hear more about. I really appreciate your time and this was fantastic. I'll let you guys go at this point, but thank you so much. That was really lovely. I think my audience is going to like adore this one. Good. Well, thanks for having a Samantha. It was so fun and Emily, I loved learning from you today. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. Of course, always have to talk about bevers. All right. That is what we have for you for today's episode. Thanks as always for listening to the podcast. And we recently lost support from one of our sponsors, from our only sponsor, who shall not be named, but nonetheless, we no longer have financial sponsorship for the podcast, which means that your Patreon donations go that much further towards supporting the work that we're doing. And hopefully more opportunities to do things like our last episode with the Montana Media Lab, where we supported rural and indigenous youth in learning more about audio storytelling. We also have a number of other episodes coming up that will be supported by our patrons. 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