Saving the Dammed: Why We Need Beaver-Modified Ecosystems

by Ellen Wohl

The ability of beavers to create an abundant habitat for a diverse array of plants and animals has been analyzed time and again. The disappearance of beavers across the northern hemisphere, and what this effects, has yet to be comprehensively studied. Saving the Dammed analyzes the beneficial role of beavers and their dams in the ecosystem of a river, focusing on one beaver meadow in Colorado. In her latest book, Ellen Wohl contextualizes North St. Vrain Creek by discussing the implications of the loss of beavers across much larger areas. Saving the Dammed raises awareness of rivers as ecosystems and the role beavers play in sustaining the ecosystem surrounding rivers by exploring the macrocosm of global river alteration, wetland loss, and the reduction in ecosystem services. The resulting reduction in ecosystem services span things such as flood control, habitat abundance and biodiversity, and nitrate reduction. Allowing readers to follow her as she crawls through seemingly
impenetrable spaces with slow and arduous movements, Wohl provides a detailed narrative of beaver meadows.
Saving the Dammed takes readers through twelve months at a beaver meadow in Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park, exploring how beavers change river valleys and how the decline in beaver populations has altered river ecosystems. As Wohl analyzes and discusses the role beavers play in the ecosystem of a river, readers get to follow her through tight, seemingly impenetrable, crawl spaces as she uncovers the benefit of dams.

Genres: Nature

206 pages, Hardcover

Published July 19, 2019

Reviews

[Adam Burnett · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve been slowly absorbing this book over the past two months because it is robust and rich in vital information. Wohl details over the course of a single year — month by month — the beaver ponds of North St. Vrain Creek in Rocky Mountain National Park, blending the rigor of poetry, science, and history into an incredibly thorough researched case for beaver-modified ecosystems. The packaging of this book is quite divine as well. For a University Press publication, they put their time and attention to the beautiful insert of color photos, maps, and expertly designed graphs detailing positive impacts of beaver on just a small tract of land in the Colorado Rockies. There’s so much to report on here but the section that whalloped me the most was the relationship between willows, beavers, and elk.

Although beavers are now my professional priority, this book serves as a wonderful guide and resource for anyone curious to go beyond Ben Goldfarb’s now much-read reportage “Eager: The Surprising and Secret Lives of Beavers and Why They Matter.” And although my book reviews only seem to decrease the number of followers I have, thankfully for those of you out there who aren’t the literary type, next week I’ll be sharing posts from our biennial BeaverCON 2022 outside Baltimore, Maryland. There’s so much research and activity happening around beavers and part of what we’ll be doing next week is launching a national climate action plan and a national working group surrounding the impact that beavers in every ecosystem niche have.