Beavers: Surprising Allies in the Fight Against Wildfires and Droughts

Beavers offer a natural solution to fighting wildfires

Beavers: Nature’s Firefighters

When we think of fighting forest fires, we typically think of human efforts like firefighters, aircraft, and firebreaks. However, there’s a lesser-known and surprising ally in the battle against wildfires: beavers. North America’s largest rodents are experts at managing water, and their actions in wetland habitats can effectively reduce wildfire destruction.

It’s a simple concept, really. Soggy ground and well-hydrated vegetation make it more difficult for fire to spread. Beavers create deep ponds by building dams, which they use to float logs and branches needed for food and construction. They also dig fingerlike canals to slowly spread water throughout the floodplain. These water highways aren’t designed for our benefit, but rather for the beavers’ own escape from predators. However, scientists are now taking notice of the beneficial side effect: beavers are creating effective firebreaks or obstacles that prevent the spread of fire.

Emily Fairfax, a California-based ecohydrologist, studies how water interacts with soil and living things. She wondered whether beaver-created wetlands could survive huge wildfires, reducing the devastating damage done to large areas of land. To test her theory, she used Google Earth to identify and map beaver dams and channels within fire perimeters. By studying years of aerial photographs from five Western states where major wildfires and droughts occurred, her team found that beavers create broad underground irrigation systems, decreasing erosion and soil loss. Most importantly, large beaver wetlands were still green and healthy after a fire. Areas without beavers averaged three times more damage than those with beavers. In places where beavers were allowed to thrive, the wetlands also became lifesaving oases for wildlife that couldn’t “out fly, out swim, or out waddle the flames.”

However, what happens when there are no beavers in an area? Many places prohibit the relocation of beavers, so an alternative is to create a beaver-friendly habitat through basic stream restoration before an environmental crisis occurs. Using local, natural materials such as logs to build man-made starter dams can increase water depth, creating conditions that encourage beavers to move in and take over maintenance of the dams while expanding the wetland habitat. Coexisting with beavers isn’t always easy, though, since humans often want to adapt the landscape to fit their own needs by draining wetlands and building houses in floodplains. Nevertheless, there are many tools for flood control and tree protection that can make it easier to live alongside beavers.

Fairfax’s original hypothesis shifted from “where can this happen” to “is there anywhere where this cannot happen?” Her research showed that the more rivers and streams that are in healthy conditions, the more fire-resistant a region will be. Fairfax and other scientists are now looking to beavers as a key part of a climate action plan for North America, calling for greater efforts at coexistence and repopulation in specific regions.

Beavers and Wildfire: a stop-motion story by Emily Fairfax

Beavers are highly skilled environmental engineers who have the unique ability to move into just about any landscape and transform it to suit their own needs. When a huge, catastrophic fire comes through a landscape, beavers create great big green patches where they live. When ash and sediment wash into rivers and threatens fish, it gets caught up in these beaver ponds and they filter it out, keeping downstream water clear.

Beavers have been an understated ally in the battle against wildfires for years, but as impacts like droughts and wildfires have grown more frequent and pronounced, people are looking for new ideas. As Fairfax said, “We’ve tried so much. What haven’t we tried? Well, beavers!” By recognizing and supporting the beavers’ natural ability to manage water, we can harness their skills to help combat the devastating.

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