Researchers uncover wildfire protection strategy hiding in plain sight — and it starts with an overlooked species
Beavers are offering forests unexpected protection against wildfires. By bolstering beaver habitats, scientists have found they can prevent parts of the environment from being scorched.
A new study shows that beaver dams and the wetlands they create were the only features to survive an incinerated landscape in the wake of recent wildfires in Colorado.
In 2020, the East Troublesome Fire became the second-largest wildfire in the state's history, burning nearly 200,000 acres and taking more than a month to contain. While assessing the damage from the fire, wildlife managers reported that only beaver ponds were untouched.
Beavers are incredible creatures, building dams to create their own habitat. The semiaquatic rodents block off streams to pool water into ponds and develop wetlands where they can build homes. The water, of course, is not flammable and offers protection against an increasing number of wildfires.
Researchers studied five fires from 2000 to 2018. In their findings, they reported that beaver ponds and canals thoroughly irrigate the surrounding land, turning dry, flammable vegetation into lush landscape. Not only did the plants survive, but the green space provided refuge to livestock and wildlife.
Wildfires impact human communities in a number of ways. Smoke inhalation increases the risk of heart attack and stroke while reducing the body's immunity. Wildfires also have an effect on mental health, causing trauma when a person is exposed to danger and loss.
Wildlife managers are looking for ways to support beaver populations. It's estimated that while there were once 100 to 200 million beavers across North America, today's numbers sit around 10 to 15 million.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is focusing on habitat restoration. In 2018, the National Wildlife Federation adopted a resolution to support beaver restoration as a response to the changing climate.
Beavers are often called nature's engineers. Their ingenuity could be the answer to surviving in a world with an ever-changing climate.
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A song for the Cahaba River
Hundreds of Alabamians flock to the Cahaba River each year during peak blooming season. (Lee Hedgepeth/Inside Climate News) This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here. WEST BLOCTON, Ala.—'The lilies have bloomed this season if you know where to go.' It's a line in Birmingham band I Declare's newly released song 'Cahaba,' and it's the truth. At the recent Cahaba Lily festival, you could hear the sacred Southern knowledge passing from one person to another. 'Where do you go? Have you been yet? Is the water low enough to see them?' The lilies, a species endemic to the southeastern U.S., are named after Alabama's longest free-flowing river, the Cahaba. They bloom boldly atop the jagged shoals that line the river's bottom each year between Mother's Day in May and Father's Day in June. This year, as is growing more often the case, an unusually rainy May has led to a less than ideal viewing season. But still, like clockwork, Alabamians have flocked to the Cahaba to see what they can. 'On the banks of the big river, watching nature's finest show,' the song's lyrics say. 'It's a biological marvel, a cesspool of teeming growth. A reflection of our survival in the water's steady flow.' It wasn't always like this. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX Dr. Larry Davenport is known as the world's foremost expert on the Cahaba Lily, scientific name Hymenocallis coronaria. He was the keynote speaker at the 35th annual Cahaba Lily Festival, a gathering about 40 miles southwest of Birmingham that he's been part of since its beginnings. When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was searching for an expert to investigate the lily and its potential candidacy as an endangered species, they turned to Davenport. At the time, in the late 1980s, the Cahaba Lily wasn't anywhere near the cultural symbol it's now become for the region. A recent academic article called the flower 'charismatic'—a characterization that left Davenport thrilled. The Cahaba Lily has come a long way in three decades, he said. 'It was a mysterious plant at the time,' Davenport said. 'Little was known about it.' So Davenport decided to take up what would ultimately become a lifelong challenge, investigating everything he could about the plant's habitat, anatomy and life cycle. Ultimately, USFWS chose not to list the Cahaba Lily as an endangered species, though organizations like the Nature Conservancy consider the lily 'threatened.' Historically, large populations of the flower have been wiped out by human activities like the damming of Alabama's rivers. The construction of a dam on the Black Warrior River in the early 1900s effectively drowned a miles-long stretch of the flowers, sometimes called shoal lilies. 'That was the motherlode,' Davenport said. 'And when the dam was put in, all of those lilies were flooded out.' A century later, another human activity—the burning of fossil fuels—has added yet another obstacle to the lily's ability to thrive. Research suggests that as the climate warms, heavy rain events in the southeast U.S. will become more frequent, as will periods of drought. Siltation, where sediment coats the shoals needed for the plant's growth, is one of the most serious threats to the Cahaba Lily, Davenport said. That type of water pollution, often caused by mining or other development upstream, can also be compounded by the impacts of climate change, which could lead to excessive rainfall that contributes to sediment runoff. As such rain events become more frequent, viewing the lilies, too, will become more difficult, as the plants will often—like this year—be covered for much of the blooming season by high river water. That human impact on the Cahaba and its lily—the effects of pollution and lax environmental regulation—are part of the dynamic that I Declare aimed to convey in their new album, 'We Ought to Celebrate.' The band's five members—Hunter Huie, Austin Noble, Ben Smith, Kyle Posten and Joseph Foster—all grew up below the Mason-Dixon Line, struggling with what it meant to be Southern, white and progressive. Huie, who grew up in Alabama, said he always identified with the rebellious, anti-authority attitude of his Southern community, but the older he got, the more he resented what he thought were the base political viewpoints that often accompanied it. As he grew older and learned more, he began to realize it was Southern Blacks and other progressives that truly embodied the ideas of fighting against the mainstream and pushing back against unchecked authority, not conservative whites who held fast to a historically bereft view of a 'lost cause.' 'I just really hate that there is this patina of white supremacy and racism that coats the surface of everything in the South,' he said. 'That's something we want to fight against. We have to dig deeper.' That's at the heart of what 'We Ought to Celebrate' is about, Huie said—painting a nuanced picture of the complex, heartbreaking, beautiful realities of the South in which he finds himself living. 'Me and my neighbors, we ain't never gonna be OK with 'Let's Go, Brandon' plate tags or those Johnny Reb battleflags,' one of the band's lyrics say. 'You and your buddies might be laughing at this son of a yuppy, but I'll take my chances putting my money right where my mouth is.' Explicit environmentalism, too, is part of what forms the fabric of I Declare's new EP. 'Cahaba dreaming,' the band's lyrics say. 'Well I just think you should know. The lilies have bloomed this season if you know where to go. And I've got the lead on sallies—they're buried in the mud. It seems so silly really, but it's in our blood.' Sallies (a reference to the region's robust salamander population), like the Cahaba Lily, have been threatened by human activity, particularly habitat destruction. Just this year, residents of a Birmingham suburb fought a development that had been set to encroach on the habitat of resident spotted salamanders. Reflecting on that kind of environmental impact is important to the band, guitarist and vocalist Ben Smith told Inside Climate News. 'We feel like being in Alabama, we're surrounded by this culture that's dominated by an affinity for the outdoors,' he said. 'But we have this precious, unique ecosystem right here that's absolutely wonderful that we actually don't care about at all, that we pollute and mismanage. There's this juxtaposition of this affection for nature while most people are also completely unconcerned with its health and well-being.' It's frustrating to witness, Smith said, but it makes for a good song. Austin Noble, a saxophonist and vocalist for the group, grew up in Adger, a mining town in western Jefferson County that garnered headlines when a mine expanded beneath its residents' feet. In March 2024, a grandfather living atop a mine in the area was killed when methane, a common byproduct of coal mining operations, leaked into his home, triggering an explosion. Noble said growing up in a mining community shaped how he views the environment and the need for regulation. 'Everyone I knew in high school, they'd finish up, then head to work for the coal mines,' Noble said. 'So they go into the mines, their health is affected and their lifespans are shortened, and this is how they're repaid. An exploded home.' That sentiment made its way into the music: 'I remember being told once Don't bite the hand that feeds But what about mother nature Who brings our thirsty throats a drink Why should she have to pay for All our externalities Growth isn't always a good thing Oh man, plaque clogs the arteries'
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6 hours ago
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Iconic Florida plant proposed to be added to Endangered Species list
Rare ghost orchid via YouTube. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed listing the ghost orchid, considered to be Florida's most famous flower, under the Endangered Species Act. The announcement came on Wednesday, more than three years after three environmental groups – the Center for Biological Diversity, The Institute for Regional Conservation and the National Parks Conservation Association— filed a petition requesting that the ghost orchid be listed under the law as a threatened species. The ghost orchid is endemic to southwestern Florida and western Cuba. It is estimated that its population has declined by more than 90% around the world, and by up to 50% in Florida. There are only an estimated 1,500 ghost orchids remaining in Florida, and less than half are known to be mature enough to reproduce. They are located mostly in the Big Cypress National Preserve, Florida Panther's National Wildlife Refuge, Fakahatchee Strand Preserve Park, Audubon's Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, and other conservation areas in Collier, Hendry, and possibly Lee counties. Among the factors that have led to the flower decreasing in population are the consequences of poaching as well as recent major storms, such as Hurricane Irma in 2017 and Hurricane Ian in 2022, says Jaclyn Lopez, an attorney with the Jacobs Law Clinic for Democracy and the Environment at Stetson University's College of Law based in Pinellas County, who is representing the conservation groups. Other factors that have led to the ghost orchid becoming more vulnerable include increased development and climate change. The ghost orchid is a leafless plant species that uses its roots to photosynthesize and attach itself to a host tree. 'The habitat changes that happen used to be quite slow over time. As sea levels have changed historically that allowed plants to move,' Lopez said. 'The difference now is that the levels are rising much more quickly, not really giving plants the opportunity to adapt and to migrate on their own, and so the concern is that some of these trees could be lost to sea level rise.' In February 2023, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission posted on social media that it had apprehended individuals attempting to steal a ghost orchid. In their petition to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the conservation groups noted that one of the chief threats to the ghost orchid was 'overcollection,' and therefore they did not list the exact locations of where the populations of the flower exist. However, Lopez says that the Endangered Species Act requires very specific data to be included in the petition process, so the conservation groups were still able to provide that information to the Fish and Wildlife Service confidentially. 'We understood that the principal threat is poaching, so we had to make sure that we weren't going to be the reason poachers could find out their exact location,' she said, adding that the federal agency was later able to communicate directly with officials at Big Cypress and Corkscrew to provide 'location specific information on the species' right down to the individual plant. In a statement, Elise Bennett, the Florida and Caribbean director and attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, welcomed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's announcement on the ghost orchid, but said it was far too early to celebrate. '[W]ith the Trump administration's incessant attacks on landmark environmental laws meant to stop species from going extinct, we know our job here isn't done,' she said. 'We'll continue to do what's necessary to ensure the ghost orchid and every other iconic Florida species has a fighting chance to thrive in our beautiful state.' 'People love plants,' adds Lopez. 'They're part of our own ecosystem and habitat. They're part of the aesthetic of living in Florida. And ghost orchids in particular are like the movie star of that ecosystem, so I imagine that this proposal will be gladly supported. I don't expect any political interference or backlash as a result. so we're just hopeful that the administration is able to move forward without further delay in giving the species finally all the protection that it needs.' The Fish and Wildlife Service is taking public comments on the proposed rule until August 4. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
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2 days ago
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Poachers hunting rare ‘ghost' flowers, near extinction
(WJW) — The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service fears if action isn't taken, the rare ghost orchid could soon be extinct. The FWS is now proposing to list the swamp-dwelling plant as an endangered species under the Endangered Species Act. Woman dies from brain-eating amoeba in tap water According to experts, the ghost orchid is a flowering plant that is only in Florida and western Cuba. It is described as a leafless plant that attaches itself by its roots high up on trees, making its white blossoms appear to hover in the air and look ghost-like. 'It is one of the most famous flowers in Florida, but its population has declined to fewer than 1,000 plants in the United States. Less than half of those are mature enough to reproduce,' warned the FWS in a press release. Ground beef sold nationwide possibly contaminated with E. Coli Experts report the plant is at risk of extinction due to multiple threats, including habitat loss and habitat degradation. However, poaching is its biggest threat. The Service said it is not proposing critical habitat for the plant out of fear that it would only increase the threat of poaching. CLICK HERE to learn more. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
