Balance of nature: importance of specific animals (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, August 09, 2022, 19:36 (836 days ago) @ David Turell

Reintroduce wolves and beavers are proposed to restore old ecosystems now damaged:

https://phys.org/news/2022-08-wolves-beavers-western-states-habitats.html

"In a paper published today in BioScience, "Rewilding the American West," co-lead author William Ripple and 19 other authors suggest using portions of federal lands in 11 states to establish a network based on potential habitat for the gray wolf—an apex predator able to trigger powerful, widespread ecological effects.

"In those states the authors identified areas, each at least 5,000 square kilometers, of contiguous, federally managed lands containing prime wolf habitat. The states in the proposed Western Rewilding Network, which would cover nearly 500,000 square kilometers, are Oregon, Washington, California, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

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"'Still, the gray wolf's current range in those 11 states is only about 14% of its historical range," said co-lead author Christopher Wolf, a postdoctoral scholar in the College of Forestry. "They probably once numbered in the tens of thousands, but today there might only be 3,500 wolves across the entire West."

"Beaver populations, once robust across the West, declined roughly 90% after settler colonialism and are now nonexistent in many streams, meaning ecosystem services are going unprovided, the authors say.

"By felling trees and shrubs and constructing dams, beavers enrich fish habitat, increase water and sediment retention, maintain water flows during drought, improve water quality, increase carbon sequestration and generally improve habitat for riparian plant and animal species.

"'Beaver restoration is a cost-effective way to repair degraded riparian areas," said co-author Robert Beschta, professor emeritus in the OSU College of Forestry. "Riparian areas occupy less than 2% of the land in the West but provide habitat for up to 70% of wildlife species."

"Similarly, wolf restoration offers significant ecological benefits by helping to naturally control native ungulates such as elk, according to the authors. They say wolves facilitate regrowth of vegetation species such as aspen, which supports diverse plant and animal communities and is declining in the West.

"The paper includes a catalogue of 92 threatened and endangered plant and animal species that have at least 10% of their ranges within the proposed Western Rewilding Network; for each species, threats from human activity were analyzed."

Comment: I've presented this before confined to the Yellowstone wolf replacement experiment which had fabulous success. Our existence on this planet requires maintaining all=l existing ecosystems as they were originally, before we damaged them.