Wildlife

Beavers are Moving to a Warming Arctic

It’s said that one beaver walked so far to get there that it rubbed the skin off the underside of its long, flat tail. Today. Beavers have homes and colonies scattered throughout the tundra in Alaska and Canada — and their numbers are increasing.

Researchers have observed that the dams beavers build accelerate changes already in play due to a warming climate. Indigenous people already have to portage around beaver dams and are worried the dams could pose a threat to the migrations of fish species they depend on.

Aerial photography from the 1950s showed no beaver ponds at all in Arctic Alaska. But in a recent study, Ken Tape, an ecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, scanned satellite images of nearly every stream, river and lake in the Alaskan tundra and found 11,377 beaver ponds.