Yes, beavers can help stop wildfires. And more places in California are embracing them
A vast burn scar unfolds in drone footage of a landscape seared by massive wildfires north of Lake Tahoe. But amid the expanses of torched trees and gray soil, an unburnt island of lush green emerges.
The patch of greenery was painstakingly engineered. A creek had been dammed, creating ponds that slowed the flow of water so the surrounding earth had more time to sop it up. A weblike system of canals helped spread that moisture through the floodplain. Trees that had been encroaching on the wetlands were felled.
But it wasn’t a team of firefighters or conservationists who performed this work. It was a crew of semiaquatic rodents whose wetland-building skills have seen them gain popularity as a natural way to mitigate wildfires.
“Beavers belong in California, and they should be part of our fire management plan,” said Emily Fairfax, assistant professor of geography at the University of Minnesota, who shot the drone footage of a series of beaver ponds along Little Last Chance Creek that remained green in the wake of the 2021 Beckwourth Complex fire.
Fairfax’s recent research found that beavers’ skills are useful even in the face of so-called megafires like the Beckwourth — a 105,000-acre behemoth whose burn scar was joined by that of the Dixie fire, which started weeks later and burned more than 960,000 neighboring acres.
