Alaska
Beaver expansion into Alaska’s Arctic tundra presents problems for people – and opportunities • Arkansas Advocate
When Cyrus Harris first saw a beaver during a camping trip in the tundra territory in the far northwest of Alaska in 1988, the discovery created a stir in his hometown of Kotzebue.
“That made big news then,” he said. He and his companions removed the beaver, which was near Cape Krusenstern just north of the Bering Strait, above the Arctic Circle and, until recently, far north of the Alaska tree line. When they heard about the beaver, Harris said, local Inupiat elders issued a warning that more would appear: “They’re coming, and that’s what’s going to be happening.”
The presence of beavers in the Arctic landscape around Kotzebue is no longer news. The beaver population, previously not an Arctic feature, has exploded in that region – and quickly transformed the landscape.
That transformation was summarized at a workshop in late February at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where scientists and community residents shared research findings and observations.
In a 100-square-kilometer area near Kotzebue — just under 40 square miles — the number of beaver dams jumped from two in 2002 to 98 in 2019, according to UAF research presented at the beginning of the three-day workshop. The workshop was part of a National Science Foundation-funded program called the Arctic Beaver Observation Network, or A-BON. On a wider area of the Baldwin Peninsula, the number went from 94 in 2010 to 409 in 2019. Across a wider area of Arctic Northwest Alaska, their presence went from nothing in the 1950s, as shown in aerial photos, to more than 11,300 beaver ponds identified through satellite imagery by 2019, according to the UAF scientists. The presence of beaver ponds in that region more than doubled between 2004 and 2017, the scientists found.
Satellite images that have tracked beaver expansion over time clearly show not just the number of dams but their drastic impacts, said Ken Tape, the UAF ecology professor who is leading the A-BON program. He pointed to one site as an example. “It basically changes from a little stream into a sprawling wetlands,” he said.
The proliferation of beavers is attributed to the northward spread of woody plants that they eat and use for their dams and lodges.
While climate change has enabled beavers to live farther north, the animals are exacerbating the effects of Arctic climate change. Through their dam and lodge engineering, they are inundating some areas with water, speeding up permafrost thaw. Elsewhere, they are drying out areas.
Effects of climate change were already underway on the tundra landscape, with permafrost warming and lakes expanding or draining and woody shrubs growing bigger and farther north, but those were relatively gradual – until the new arrivals began engineering the landscape, Tape said.
“All of a sudden, the beaver shows up. It’s like, wham, just night and day, completely different,” he said.
‘Tundra Be Dammed’
Tape, who got into beaver studies when he and UAF permafrost expert Ben Jones were tracking climate change effects on the tundra, has now become a leading authority on the animals’ northward expansion. A famous study that he led, published in 2018, described the phenomenon in Northwest Alaska and bore a catchy title: Tundra Be Dammed.
Beavers can be as disruptive to the tundra ecosystem as wildfires are, Tape and his colleagues have concluded.
Beaver presence in Arctic Alaska largely stops at the Continental Divide in the Brooks Range, leaving the North Slope largely beaver-free – for now. There are some exceptions discovered recently: a beaver pond complex that was found on the Kongakut River, which flows through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge near the Canadian border, and some chew marks and tracks left by beavers on the Killik River, which flows from a point in Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve into the bigger Colville River.
But that North Slope situation is expected to change, Tape said. Projections are that if the climate continues its current warming trend and shrubs continue spreading north, beavers will follow, moving down the northern side of the divide to establish themselves across the entire North Slope by century’s end, he said. “They’re poised to swim downstream,” he said.
For many residents, their animals’ new presence is a serious problem.
“We’re surrounded by beaver lodges,” said Ralph Ramoth of Selawik, an Inupiat village about 90 miles east of Kotzebue.
Beaver structures have blocked access to traditional areas for duck hunting and berry-picking, and they’ve created barriers on creeks where fish used to spawn, Ramoth said. They have affected water quality as well, he said.
“When I was young, you used to be able to drink the water out of the river. Nowadays you don’t,” he said. Those who try, he said, get stomach distress. “People call it ‘beaver fever,’” he said, referring to the unpleasant intestinal infection caused by the parasite giardia.
Beaver sins
There is a long litany of observed or suspected beaver sins in their new Arctic territory that were discussed at the workshop.
Their dams can be insurmountable barriers to fish, particularly to the whitefish that are important subsistence foods but not particularly strong swimmers. That affects people who depend on those fish for their diets – and reverberates through the food web in ways that might seem surprising. Belugas in Arctic waters, for example, depend on whitefish populations that might be harmed by new beaver presence.
As articulated by Ramoth and by residents of Canada’s Northwest Territories who attended the workshop, beaver structures can impede travel, blocking boat routes long used in the summer and turning once-dependable winter ice-travel routes into danger zones.
Deteriorated water quality is a widespread concern; Harris noted that beaver complexes are plentiful just upstream of the reservoir that is the drinking-water source for Kotzebue.
There are potentially longer-term and wider-ranging effects as well.
By speeding permafrost thaw, they are hastening the release of carbon into the atmosphere, scientists said. That is because permafrost holds organic material accumulated over thousands of years that, through freeze, is resistant to decomposition, said Michael Loranty, an associate professor of geography at Colgate University in New York.
“But when you start thawing that out, it starts decomposing,” he said at the workshop. “And if, you know, you’re kind of putting all that permafrost carbon in the bank slowly over tens of thousands of years and then you thaw it out very quickly, it’s kind of a big pulse, potentially, into the atmosphere.”
There is evidence that such pulses are already underway. Work led by UAF researcher Jason Clark detected hotspots of methane emissions from Northwest Alaska beaver ponds. Methane is a particularly potent greenhouse gas and is known to be produced from permafrost thaw. The discovery of “is an example of a new disturbance regime, wrought by an ecosystem engineer, accelerating the effects of climate change in the Arctic,” said the 2023 study, which was coauthored by Tape, Jones and others at UAF, along with scientists from the National Park Service and the California Institute of Technology.
There are related effects. Though studies are preliminary, there is evidence that beavers are contributing to higher mercury levels in the water systems – and thus in fish populations. Permafrost thaw releases natural elemental mercury that is stored in frozen peat, and beavers stimulate that thaw.. Additionally, the beavers may be inadvertently helping to convert that elemental mercury into methylmercury, the form that is most dangerous to people and animals.
“Beavers bring a lot of wood to streams,” Matthew Mervyn, a graduate student who is studying the question in Canada’s Northwest Territories, said at the workshop. “Since the water slows down, it introduces more bacteria to methyl-ize the mercury.”
Mervyn, with Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University, is part of a Canadian-British program called Beavers and Socio-ecological Resilience in Inuit Nunangat, or BARIN. It focuses on the Arctic region of the Northwest Territories. There, Indigenous hunters were the first to document colonization of the Beaufort Sea coast by beavers, with the animals spotted in 2008 and 2009.
The benefits of beavers
But there is another side of beavers in the Arctic.
“If I had a T-shirt, it would say, ‘I love beavers.’ I love them. They’re the best things in the world,” Lance Kramer, one of only about three Kotzebue residents who regularly trap beavers, said at the workshop.
He acknowledged that many of his Kotzebue neighbors greeted the news of beaver presence with the expression “Aiee,” a somewhat untranslatable Inupiaq expression of alarm and annoyance.
Kramer, in contrast, has taken advantage of the new arrivals. When he traps a fat beaver, he can use it for meat. The meat from skinny beavers goes to his dog, he said. He is making money selling the pelts. He has created his own detailed map of beaver lodges in the area, with names like “Faceplant Place Lodge” “About Time Lodge” and “Mad Snowman Lake Lodge,” the latter so named because his son became so annoyed about waiting for him to show up there that he built a snowman with an angry face.
He has even taken his love of beavers to show business, albeit subtly. He was an actor in the Alaska-based HBO series True Detective: The Night Country, and in a tense scene where his character brandishes a gun at law enforcement officers, he is wearing a beaver hat made by his mother-in-law.
Kramer brought up other beaver benefits. Aside from supplying meat, fur and income, beavers make it easier for him to hunt or trap other animals that gather at the structures, like wolverines and minks. “You can get everything at a beaver lodge. It’s a one-stop shop,” he said.
Evidence, mostly from outside of Alaska, shows that beaver lodges and dams can create habitat for other species, from insects to birds to predators. Research into that is continuing through the A-BON program; one project, explained by UAF graduate student Sebastian Zavoico, is using sound recorders to track bird diversity at recently established Alaska beaver sites.
While many Arctic residents are leery about the impacts of beaver dams and lodges to fish, evidence gathered to date paints a mixed picture.
In the Lower 48, where many riparian systems have been damaged by development, beavers are often considered restorers. Numerous studies there have found that beaver colonization is good for fish.
In Alaska, where study of the beaver-fish relationship is just starting, the evidence is that the animals have been positive influences in some spots and negative in others, according to information presented at the conference by UAF graduate student William Samuel. He has been tracking the relationship between beavers and Arctic grayling – and the relationship between beavers, grayling and wildfire. Within Interior Alaska, he found strong evidence that beaver densities increased in burned areas and that the combination of beavers and fires could be bad for grayling.
But the presence of beavers can make forested areas resistant to fires, too. Dammed areas can serve as fire breaks and help speed ecosystem recovery after wildfires, research in the Lower 48 has found.
The “beaver fever” name notwithstanding, beavers may not be as responsible as people think for giardia infections, said Glynnis Hood, an environmental science professor at the University of Alberta. “Beavers always get the rap, but humans carry giardia, too, and they don’t always clean up after themselves,” she said at the workshop.
Entrenched in the tundra landscape?
Future action on beavers might address both negative and positive aspects, suggested Andy Bassich of Eagle, an Interior community near the Canadian border.
“I don’t want, really, to use the word ‘infestation,’ but in some people’s minds that’s the appropriate word,” he said. In his region, where beavers have long been established, the animals have become a good source of food that substitutes for traditional food sources like salmon that are in short supply, he said.
If people want to get rid of “nuisance beavers” that might be blocking fish passage or creating other problems, perhaps there should be some kind of combined economic and cultural program that trains young people to hunt and trap them, process them, tan the hides, providing both meat and income, Bassich said.
Whatever Alaskans and Arctic residents decide to do about them, beavers may be in the far north for good.
That was a lesson imparted by Lennie Emaghok, an elder from Tuktoyaktuk, a Northwest Territories Inupiat community on the Beaufort Sea coast.
He recounted how in 2020, along a relatively short stretch of creek, he and others found 10 beaver structures and quickly removed most of them, including one that was particularly towering.
“When we returned three days later, the dam was built back, as if we had never touched it,” he said.
Hood summarized the power of the wood-chomping rodent. “Never underestimate a beaver,” she said.
Alaska Beacon is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: [email protected]. Follow Alaska Beacon on Facebook and Twitter.
A conservationist from Kennebunk, Maine, died in a helicopter crash while conducting conservation work in Alaska.
The death of Shiloh Schulte, PhD,, who previously served as an elected official in Kennebunk, was announced by the Manomet Conservation Sciences. A GoFundMe has been set up to support his family, including his wife and two daughters.
He was 46.
“Shiloh was a lifelong birdwatcher, conservationist, and scientist whose passion for the natural world was infectious,” the GoFundMe, co-organized by Jonah Jill Schulte reads. “From a young age, he could be found exploring forests and wetlands with binoculars in hand, always eager to discover and share the wonders of the avian world. His dedication to protecting shorebirds and their habitats took him to some of the most remote and challenging environments on Earth, where he worked tirelessly to ensure a future for these vulnerable species.”
Schulte previously served on the Kennebunk Select Board. Schulte was elected chairman of the board in July 2022. At the time, his colleagues said he had a “really great way about him to move things forward, regardless of where he is on the spectrum of an issue.”
Schulte’s work with the Manomet Conservation Sciences included working as the coordinator for the American Oystercatcher Recovery Program. He is credited with rebuilding the American Oystercatcher, a large shorebird once believed to be locally extirpated, by 45%.
“Shiloh gave his life in the service of something greater than himself, dedicating himself to preserving the natural world for future generations,” the Manomet Conservation Sciences said.
His family said he will be remembered as more than a scientist.
“Shiloh was so much more than a scientist,” the GoFundMe page states. “He was a devoted husband and father, a loving son and brother, a generous neighbor, and a pillar of his community. Whether he was helping a neighbor with yard work, leading the town Select Board, running a marathon or inspiring others through his photography and storytelling, Shiloh gave his all—always with a warm heart and boundless energy.”
The Trump Administration’s unilateral imposition of tariffs, tax cuts for the rich and elimination of cabinet departments and federal employees invite U.S. economic calamity.
The trade war tariffs will neither reduce U.S. trade deficits nor bring about a renaissance in American manufacturing. Federal government revenue generated by these tariffs will cover only a fraction of the revenue lost to tax cuts proposed in the federal budget bill. The oppressive, indiscriminate federal workforce reductions brought about by the Department of Government Efficiency raise deep concerns about the delivery of immediate critical health, safety and welfare services and longer-term agency function. One would be hard pressed to craft a more irresponsible economic policy. It punishes the poor today and future generations of Americans.
The Trump fiscal plan is corrosive for the U.S. as a whole and disastrous for Alaska in particular. Consider each of these fiscal plan elements in turn:
Trade war
The Trump administration’s heavy-handed tariffs on steel, aluminum, automobiles and other raw materials and finished goods are illegal and will raise the costs of imported cars, equipment, machinery and supplies to American manufacturing firms and ultimately result in higher costs passed through to intermediate goods and end-product consumers. In general, a tariff on imported goods and services amounts to a sales tax levied on domestic, U.S. businesses and consumers. It’s a highly regressive form of taxation, hitting low- and middle-income households the hardest. Right now, the blended ‘sales tax’ rate on all imported goods stands at 17.8 percent, up 15 points from its pre-2025 levels. Since imports are more than 11 percent of GDP, it’s a huge pending inflation uptick to consumer prices, which can already be seen in the recent, steep decline in consumer sentiment. Beyond this, the chaotic, haphazard implementation of tariff policy is acutely counterproductive to business investment because trade policy predictability is the cornerstone of well-managed fiscal policy. This is why federal law does not authorize the president to impose tariffs without congressional approval.
For Alaska commerce, which lies at the very edge of the global logistics, the impact from this hurtful cost structure and supply chain disruption has already fueled business network chaos and American brand destruction. Other damages include 1) weakened crude oil price impacts on state royalty and tax revenue, on Permanent Fund earnings, and on oil company capital project optics; 2) time-critical Alaska seafood market disruption from China and other Asia-Pacific counter-tariff policies; 3) falling tourism bookings and 4) disastrous cost increases on the already budget-stressed Alaska LNG energy lifeline. The ultimate outcome of this trade war for Alaska and American business is higher structural inflation, investment contraction, business slowdown, rising unemployment, climbing interest rates, and widening housing and stock market implosion – all tipping the U.S. and especially Alaska toward a recessionary downward spiral. And all entirely unwarranted and unnecessary.
Federal budget and tax cuts. The proposed “big beautiful” budget bill passed on May 22 by the House of Representatives will deepen federal debt to $40 trillion or to 125 percent of GDP by 2035. In response to this nightmare scenario, Moody’s rating agency lowered the U.S. government’s credit score. The U.S. bond market reacted; yields on medium- and long-term US Treasury bonds spiked yet again. According to CBO estimates, the proposed tax cuts will lower after-tax income to the bottom 40% and raise after tax-income to the richest 10%. In addition to tariff shocks, Alaska household disposable income and business earnings will be impaired by the combined impacts of regressive income taxation and higher interest costs.
Beyond these disturbing policy and market dislocations, the proposed budget bill imposes unconscionable safety net impairment to America’s most vulnerable population, including added work requirements and cuts to healthcare spending ($715 billion), SNAP/food stamps ($300 billion), and Medicare ($500 billion). Alaska’s 279,000 Medicaid recipients (including 109,000 children) would face about $3 billion in uncovered healthcare costs for which no safety net alternative exists.
Department of Government Efficiency actions. Over the past 90 days, DOGE has carried out indiscriminate layoffs of about 280,000 federal employees and contractors without consideration for organizational structure and job function; all in the quest to save money by eliminating waste. The layoffs have extended beyond federal agencies, affecting contractors and nonprofit organizations that rely on federal funding. The ripple effect has led to additional job losses, with over 4,400 positions eliminated in related sectors.
Alaska’s 15,000 federal employees, including about 8,000 military, play a disproportionate role in our economy, both in public service delivery and in disposable income. Alaska’s federal workforce serve in mostly year-round jobs, are among the state’s highest paid workers and, critically, they spend locally. Setting aside diminished quality-of-life, public safety and security, a 15% reduction in Alaska’s federal workforce — well below DOGE 20-30% federal reduction target — would result in direct, devastating $250 million in lost wages to local business spending, based on $1.6 billion in reported Alaska federal workforce earnings in 2024 from Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development. Add to this further indirect, additional multiplier losses that would follow in step.
Taken together, the Trump Administration’s tariffs and tax cuts will cause economic chaos and destruction. So far, global tariffs — even those recently scaled back — have resulted in trillions of dollars in U.S. capital market destruction, enormous financial market instability, and the promise of rising inflation with slowing economic growth. President Trump’s faulty perception of tariff ‘medicine’ to fix bilateral trade deficits and to generate new federal revenue is analogous to a physician prescribing heavy chemo doses to a perfectly healthy patient. Furthermore, giving gigantic tax cuts to the wealthiest households is like to prescribing steroids to the now-ailing patient — due entirely to unnecessary and irresponsible tariff poisoning! And DOGE’s reckless efforts have brought disruption and dysfunction to all levels of the federal government’s responsibility for: protecting individual rights, overseeing infrastructure and commerce, and providing a safety net lifeline.
Bottom Line: The Alaska congressional delegation must continue to build the congressional coalitions to accomplish three critical things:
• Assert congressional tariff-making authority and oversight to reign in the president,
• Restore congressional authority for federal program formation and spending, and
• Craft a budget that protects the safety net and keeps guard rails on federal deficit expansion.
Will Nebesky is an economist and pilot who lives in Anchorage.
• • •
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Schulte had traveled to Alaska to conduct conservation work, the statement said. He and the helicopter pilot were flying west from Prudhoe Bay to an area where he planned to outfit shorebirds with recording devices when the helicopter crashed on Wednesday, according to a spokesperson for Manomet Conservation Sciences.
The region Schulte was visiting has become a flashpoint in the debate over balancing the nation’s energy needs and confronting climate change. The oil company ConocoPhillips wants to establish an oil drilling venture there known as the Willow Project.
Schulte had also planned to visit the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where he was to lead a crew tracking the migratory routes of whimbrels, another shorebird, with satellite transmitters, Manomet Conservation Sciences said.
The National Transportation Safety Board said the crash of the Robinson R66 helicopter killed the pilot and passenger, the only two people aboard. Authorities have not announced what caused the crash and are investigating.
Alaska Public Media identified the pilot as Jonathan Guibas, 54, who worked for Pollux Aviation in Wasilla. Guibas’s mother told the news organization that Guibas had joined the company about a month ago, and had previously lived in California, Guam, and Virginia.
The crash occurred on the first day of the bird study, about 20 miles west of Deadhorse in North Slope, the northernmost section of the state, Clint Johnson, chief of the safety board’s regional office in Alaska, said Friday.
“It’s in a very remote part of Alaska,” Johnson said. “There’s nothing there. It’s treeless, barren, in the middle of no place.”
Earlier last week, the region had been visited by high-ranking members of the Trump administration.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin toured parts of the North Slope to advocate for President Trump’s desire to open parts of the Alaskan wilderness to drilling and mining.
The helicopter had taken off at about 10:40 a.m. The pilot had received special weather clearance, known as VFR, or visual flight rules clearance, Johnson said.
North Slope Borough Search and Rescue traveled to the crash site on Wednesday and retrieved the victims’ bodies; on Friday afternoon, NTSB investigators visited the scene, which is only accessible by helicopter, he said.
An NTSB meteorologist and air traffic controller are working with investigators, who plan to transport the helicopter wreckage to Deadhorse to continue their work, according to Johnson. Officials plan to place the wreckage in a sling tethered to a helicopter for the journey back to Deadhorse, which has an airport, he said.
Last Saturday, Schulte shared photographs of violet-green and tree swallows he had spotted at Creamer’s Field, a wildlife refuge in Fairbanks, Alaska, according to his Instagram page.
Schulte coordinated an American oystercatcher recovery program that was launched in 2009 at Manomet Conservation Sciences. Conservation work by the program and its partners along the East Coast helped to rebuild the American oystercatcher population by 45 percent, the organization said.
“Shiloh gave his life in the service of something greater than himself, dedicating himself to preserving the natural world for future generations,” the group’s statement said.
In March, Schulte discussed progress in regrowing the population of the American oystercatcher, a striking shorebird with long, orange-red bills and black-and-white plumage that lives along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, according to a news release from Manomet Conservation Sciences.
In 2008, he said the population had dropped to fewer than 10,000 birds across the Americas, a 10 percent decline. Conservation efforts reversed that slide and there are now more than 14,000 birds.
“This success proves that when we commit to conservation, we can restore declining species,” he said in a statement on March 13.
Following the devastating BP oil spill that released millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, Schulte led a crew of researchers enlisted by the government to document the environmental impact on wildlife.
Schulte’s team was hired by the US Fish and Wildlife Service to locate resident oystercatchers in coastal Louisiana and outfit the oiled ones with radio transmitters to track their health, he told the Globe in 2010.
He earned a doctorate at North Carolina State University, where he studied American oystercatchers on the Outer Banks and helped to band and track the birds, according to his biography on the website for Manomet Conservation Sciences. As an undergraduate student, Schulte studied wildlife biology at the University of Vermont.
He was a competitive distance runner and earned a second-degree black belt in tae kwon do, the biography said.
In April, he ran the Boston Marathon, finishing the race with a time of 2 hours, 52 minutes, and 50 seconds. The time placed him 137th among 2,386 men between ages 45 and 49 who competed, according to results from the Boston Athletic Association.
Laura Crimaldi can be reached at laura.crimaldi@globe.com. Follow her @lauracrimaldi. Tonya Alanez can be reached at tonya.alanez@globe.com. Follow her @talanez.
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