There are studies showing the carbon capture of beaver ponds and the water storage.
So why not design a test project and raise money to fund it?
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Ellen Wohl, a geoscientist at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, tromped down the waterways of Rocky Mountain National Park in 2010 and 2011 to find out exactly how much carbon beavers were storing in their ponds. “It was just one old dam after another,” she said.
Wohl then studied maps of the region and, treating her measurements of existing beaver habitat as a rough average, estimated how much carbon would be stored in the park’s beaver meadows as a whole, if all of them were still maintained by the industrious rodents.
What she found surprised her: The beaver meadows – existing and defunct together – would have held 23 percent of the total carbon in the 177,000 acres she studied. “That’s pretty impressive since the meadows are only maybe 1 or 2 percent of the total landscape,” said Wohl.
A scientific paper by Wohl describing her new findings has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
Few beavers currently reside in the park. After wolves were hunted to extinction in the 1920s, the park’s elk population exploded. The elk feast on the aspen and willow trees beavers rely on for nourishment and construction material. The lack of suitable trees essentially knocked beavers out of the ecosystem.
Beavers modify their environments more than any other creature in nature, creating habitats for other animals and plants. Without their caretakers to maintain them, beaver meadows convert to what Wohl calls elk grasslands. According to Wohl, these shrubby grasslands hold just a third the carbon of the wet beaver meadows. The total loss of carbon storage in the region she studied from beaver meadows becoming elk grasslands was nearly 2 million tons—equivalent to the amount of carbon released each year from about 350,000 cars.
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An experiment in Devon found that a pair of introduced beavers have created dams that altered the water flow, preventing flooding and helping to maintain a constant release of water through dryer months.
“There has been much more of an impact than we thought a couple of beavers could possibly have in such a small site. 650,000 litres can now be stored here. When this was just a woodland with a small stream, that would have been just a few hundred litres.
http://www.permaculture.co.uk/articles/using-beavers-naturally-manage-flooding
