Restoring wetland biodiversity using research: Whole‐community facilitation by beaver as framework

Nummi, Petri; Holopainen, Sari

doi:10.1002/aqc.3341

Cited by 20 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Restoring beavers to areas they have been extirpated from has received attention as a natural framework for achieving ecological restoration objectives. Beaver‐assisted restoration has been touted as a tool for repairing incised and degraded stream systems throughout the western USA and parts of Eurasia (Burchsted et al 2010, Pollock et al 2014), while others have advocated for using beavers to rewild ecosystems (Law et al 2017, Willby et al 2018) and facilitate wetland biodiversity (Nummi and Holopainen 2014, 2020, Law et al 2019). We suggest beaver engineering could be used to increase surface water storage and promote freshwater conservation efforts in forested ecosystems.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relics of beavers past: time and population density drive scale‐dependent patterns of ecosystem engineering

et al. 2021

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Like many ecological processes, natural disturbances exhibit scale-dependent dynamics that are largely a function of the magnitude, frequency and scale at which they are assessed. Ecosystem engineers create patch-scale disturbances that affect ecological processes, yet we know little about how these effects scale across space or vary through time.Here, we investigate how patch disturbances by beavers Castor canadensis, ecosystem engineers renowned for their pond-creation behavior, affect ecological processes across space and time. We evaluated how beaver population recovery influenced surface water dynamics in relation to population density over 70 years across multiple spatial scales (pond, watershed and regional) in northern Minnesota. Surface water area was positively related to population density at the watershed scale; however, despite variation in beaver densities (and therefore surface water area) at the watershed scale, regional-scale surface water area was stable through time. This stability appears to have been driven by asynchronous beaver density fluctuations among watersheds, combined with the increasing importance of abandoned ponds. Beavers initially created and occupied larger ponds with greater surface water area, but through time shifted towards occupying smaller ponds. As ponds accumulated on the landscape proportionally more surface water was stored within abandoned ponds, which offset the smaller size of occupied ponds. Beaver engineering -driven by density-dependent mechanisms and the legacy effects from abandoned ponds -not only follows general patterns of patch disturbance dynamics by creating a spatial mosaic of patches, but the organism-created mosaic also appears to generate ecological stability at greater spatial scales. We suggest restoring beavers to landscapes is a viable method for increasing surface water storage and will ultimately help advance numerous conservation and rewilding objectives. Our study demonstrates that ecosystem engineering effects can be scale-dependent, indicating researchers should evaluate the ecological impact of engineers across diverse spatiotemporal scales to fully understand their functional roles in ecosystems.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relics of beavers past: time and population density drive scale‐dependent patterns of ecosystem engineering

et al. 2021

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“…25,000 km 2 of new aquatic pond habitat and 550,000 km of riparian interface have been created in boreal and temperate zones (Whitfield et al 2015). Beavers have been proposed as a tool for biodiversity conservation (Law et al 2019;Nummi and Holopainen 2020), and several studies have shown that beavercreated succession can affect aquatic invertebrates in a beaver-modified landscape at a general level (Bush et al 2019;Washko et al 2020). One of the first studies to focus on a specific taxon of aquatic invertebrates found a difference in water beetle abundance in beaver wetlands and non-beaver wetlands (Willby et al 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beaver creates early successional hotspots for water beetles

et al. 2021

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Beavers (Castor spp.) are ecosystem engineers that induce local disturbance and ecological succession, which turns terrestrial into aquatic ecosystems and creates habitat heterogeneity in a landscape. Beavers have been proposed as a tool for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem restoration. So far, most research has compared biodiversity in beaver wetlands and non-beaver wetlands, but few studies have explored how beaver-created succession affects specific taxa. In this study, we investigated how water beetles responded to different successional stages of wetlands in a beaver-disturbed landscape at Evo in southern Finland. We sampled water beetles with 1-L activity traps in 20 ponds, including: 5 new beaver ponds, 5 old beaver ponds, 5 former beaver ponds, and 5 never engineered ponds. We found that beaver wetlands had higher species richness and abundance than non-beaver wetlands, and that new beaver wetlands could support higher species richness (321%) and abundance (671%) of water beetles compared to old beaver wetlands. We think that higher water beetle diversity in new beaver ponds has resulted from habitat amelioration (available lentic water, shallow shores, aquatic vegetation, and low fish abundance) and food source enhancement (an increase of both dead and live prey) created by beaver dams and floods. We conclude that using beavers as a tool, or imitating their way of flooding, can be beneficial in wetland restoration if beaver population densities are monitored to ensure the availability of newly colonizable sites.

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“…процессы и функции лесов Роль животных в функционировании наземных экосистем, в том числе лесных, оценивалась в работах многих исследователей (Гиляров, 1951;Гиляров, Криволуцкий, 1985;Исаев и др., 2015;Isaev et al, 2017;Стриганова, 1980Стриганова, , Edwards et al, 1995Динесман, 1961;Ходашева, Елисеева, 1970;Формозов, 1976;Млекопитающие…, 1985;Абатуров, 1984;Раститель-ноядные…, 1986;Торопова, 1994;Бобровский, 2010;Горнов, 2013;Шевченко, 2016;Kurek, 2019;Saikkonen et al, 2019;Evstigneev, Solonina, 2020;Nummi, Holopainen, 2020 1994,2004).…”

Section: влияние животных на экосистемныеunclassified

“…Крупномасштабные изменения в современном лесном биогеоценотическом покрове производят бобры (Castor fiber). Средопреобразующие воздействия бобров проявляются на всех пространственных уровнях (Торопова, 1994;Смирнова, 1998;Wright et al, 2002;Восточноевропейские..., 2004;Завьялов и др., 2005;Алейников, 2010;Завьялов, 2013;Логофет и др., 2014 Сооружения бобров активно используются сухопутными, околоводными и водными животными (Nummi et al, 2011;Nummi, Holopainen, 2020). Например, бобровые пруды во время засухи служат водопоями для птиц и зверей.…”

Section: ландшафтный уровеньunclassified

Biodiversity and climate regulating functions of forests: current issues and prospects for research

Лукина¹,

Geraskina²,

Горнов³

et al. 2020

FSI

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The problem of assessing the impact of biodiversity on the climate-regulating functions of forests has fundamental character and great importance for sustainable forest management in the context of global climate change. On the one hand, climate changes affect biodiversity, on the other hand, it is biodiversity, as a provider of all ecosystem functions, underlies the mechanisms of adaptation to these changes. This paper aims to discuss scientific questions about the links between biodiversity and climate-regulating functions of forests, and to outline the prospects for these studies. It is shown that studies of the influence of plant and animal species – ecosystem engineers on forest ecosystem’s functioning, including climate-regulating processes and functions, are quite numerous. However, studies of the combined effects of the diversity of biota belonging to different trophic levels and groups on climate-regulating functions of forests of different types/different stages of succession are not carried out. In such studies, it is important to take into account both taxonomic, including genetic, and functional biodiversity as well as structural diversity of forests. Various concepts of forest management taking into account the conservation and restoration of biodiversity are considered. An important aspect of this problem is the assessment and prediction of relationships (synergy or trade-offs) between climate-regulating and other ecosystem functions of forests with different levels of biodiversity functioning in natural conditions and under the combined impact of natural and anthropogenic factors, including climate change, fires, and forestry regimes. It is shown that a promising approach to assessing and predicting the dynamics of relationships between different ecosystem functions of forests is the integration of mathematical models.

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Restoring wetland biodiversity using research: Whole‐community facilitation by beaver as framework

Cited by 20 publications

References 33 publications

Relics of beavers past: time and population density drive scale‐dependent patterns of ecosystem engineering

Relics of beavers past: time and population density drive scale‐dependent patterns of ecosystem engineering

Beaver creates early successional hotspots for water beetles

Biodiversity and climate regulating functions of forests: current issues and prospects for research

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