At this specific point in time, here in the Willamette valley, there is no more important group of plants than the willows. Here’s why:
Beaver + willows + sad, warm little ditches = 1000 X more water + fish + better water quality
It really is that simple. We will never achieve our water quality and quantity goals until we bother to do this bit of math and then apply it. In the Willamette Valley, we spend hundreds of millions of dollars every single year trying to improve the quality of the comparatively tiny trickle of water that remains on the landscape. There is only a tiny trickle left because from the late 1800’s all the way through the 1970’s we trapped out the beaver, dug ditches, and buried tiles throughout the Willamette Valley to dry up wetlands in order to grow upland crops on them. This means that, instead of being detained on the landscape, much of the water that falls as rain and snow is now conducted to the Pacific Ocean as fast as possible all winter and spring. By the time weather gets warm and dry in May and June, almost all of the surface water that used to be spread across the landscape in beaver marshes and swamps is long gone, and the streams and rivers these marshes sustained through the summer months now instead dry down to trickles.
This state of affairs has not changed appreciably since 1980 despite billions of dollars spent trying to improve water quality and fish habitat. The drainage infrastructure in the Willamette Valley is still 99% intact, and the effect of this drainage network is at least three orders of magnitude less surface water today than we used to have. This is not an exaggeration. Here on our farm, we have allowed the beaver to do their thing on a 770-foot stretch of Roderick Creek. What was a little 2-foot-wide trickle of water maybe 1 inch deep has been replaced by a 109,000 square foot swamp that is over two feet deep. Here is the math:
770 lineal feet X 2 feet wide / 12 = 128 cubic feet of water
109,000 square-foot swamp X 2 feet deep = 218,000 cubic feet of water
218,000/128 = 1700X more water! Comparable estimates of the historic loss and potential gain of water can be performed at sites like Cedar Canyon (Killin) Swamp (1900X more) Fanno Creek (1400X more) and others where beaver have returned and been allowed to do their work. A more comprehensive and precise estimate of water loss/gain still remains to be done, but this gives us a starting point for estimating the remaining summer surface water in the Willamette Valley now compared to the early 1800’s. The water remaining today is represented by the blue cells below:
The empty cells represent the additional water we used to have. The six blue cells are what’s left, and where we expect to improve water quality and support fish. That isn’t going to work, and the money we are pouring into them is never going to change it. Until we fill a large proportion of those empty cells with water, we are wasting our time and resources.
There is good news here! We can easily fill up lots of those empty cells for a fraction of what we are now paying for largely fruitless and futile water quality and fisheries enhancement. We can save the taxpayers and ratepayers enormous sums of money and be more effective with the money we do spend. And it can happen fast. All we have to do is plant willows along the ditches and then let the beaver do what they do. The wetlands will return, and within five years, we will have a lot more blue cells. These cells will support more fish, the water will be far cleaner, and we will have a more sustainable and reliable water supply for all of things we need water for. We will need to pay farmers for the ground covered by new wetlands, but this is very doable and comparatively inexpensive relative to what we spend now. And even more importantly, the investment will actually pay off.
From a climate adaptation point of view, the importance of water conservation and wildfire abatement afforded us by beaver and willows cannot be overstated. We have demonstrated this over and over at this point, and more and more people are seeing it. So now is the time to make the change.
Which brings me back to willows.
I could fill pages and pages of blog with what we now know about willows, and still just be scratching the surface. I will wax on about willows and get into the details of taxonomy and ecology of individual species in several of the next posts, but for right now, I will share just a brief summary.
In the Willamette Valley we have just four species of willow that I would call “common.” These are Salix scouleriana (Scouler willow), S. hookeriana var piperi (Piper willow), S. sitchensis (Sitka willow), and S. lasiandra (Pacific willow). In addition, we have four other species that are either rare or restricted to narrow habitats. These are: S. geyeriana (Geyer willow), S. exigua var columbiana (Columbia River willow), S. sessilifolia (soft-leaved willow) and S. prolixa (McKenzie willow). These species are reasonably easy to delimit in the field generally, but occasional oddballs do show up which are likely hybrids and hybrid derivatives. Introgression is almost certainly operating in many ways in all of these populations, but is constantly counteracted by selection within specific habitats. The species are ecologically isolated, involving flowering phenology, seed ecology, morphology and physiology. Species habitats are often subtly distinguished and overlapping. So it’s complicated, but that’s what makes willows interesting!
We have grown all eight of the above species and have six currently available as seed-grown seedlings and seven as cuttings. We have perfected the art of seed-based willow propagation, and as a result, we have over 130,000 seedlings available right now. The incredible genetic diversity represented by these seed-grown plants is our best guarantee of climate adaptiveness. Buy several thousand and plant them for the beaver and for the water they conserve for us, fish and wildlife! You (and they) won’t be disappointed!!