The beaver, the endearing animal that devastates Patagonian forests in southern Chile

Measuring just 75 centimeters long and a beloved icon in many parts of North America, the American beaver is taking over native forests in southern Chilithus contributing to the climate crisis.

Without a predator to hunt it, the beaver has reproduced exponentially in just a few decades to become a devastating pest that threatens Chilean and Argentine Patagonia, where forests retain almost twice as much carbon per hectare as the Amazon. The National Forestry Corporation (Conaf) estimates that only in southern Tierra del Fuego there are between 65,000 and 110,000 specimens.

Introduced in the 1940s to Argentina to promote the fur industry, the beaver is considered an engineering genius: it carves trees with its teeth and creates dams over one meter high and up to 100 meters long, flooding land in those who place their burrows, with underground entrances.

The Chilean native forest has a surface area almost twice the capacity of the Amazon jungle to store carbon from the atmosphere, according to a study led by the University of Chile, but beaver degradation not only slows down this absorption, but also converts the trees killed in a greenhouse gas bomb.

By covering forested areas with water, the trees that are still standing drown, fall and rot, a process that emits large amounts of methane into the atmosphere, a gas that is much more polluting than CO2.

“Every bit at the end of the day adds up. The southern tip of Chile is a particular area because it is very far south in a sub-Antarctic zone, it is home to ancient forests and has a direct influence on the hole in the ozone layer”Julio Salas, a researcher at the Yucatan Scientific Research Center (CICY) in Mexico, explained to EFE.

“For this reason, the gases that are released here have repercussions on a global scale”added the expert, who is in Chile studying greenhouse gas emissions emitted by forests devastated by beavers.

Magellan, a carbon sponge

Along with native forests, the Magallanes region is home to another ecosystem with a great capacity to capture carbon and mitigate climate change: peat bogs, a type of wetland in which several meters of organic material have accumulated for thousands of years without decomposing.

The region, located more than 2,200 kilometers south of Santiago, is estimated to be home to more than 30,000 square kilometers of peat bogs, which grow by about half a millimeter a year due to the small plants that grow on their surface.

Frederic Thalasso, also a CICY researcher, alerted EFE that, if they are left to dry or are exploited to extract fuel, peat bogs have the capacity to release the equivalent of 200 years of greenhouse gas emissions from the country.

“If the carbon stored in Chilean peatlands were released, it would be something like 15 gigatonnes of CO2 released into the atmosphere”he added.

“More science is needed”

The ecosystems of the extreme latitudes in both hemispheres of the planet share many characteristics, but the gap between the investigations carried out in the north and in the south of the planet is abysmal.

“Our studies in the peatlands are quite recent, barely a year old, and require very expensive equipment. With the data we have, we still cannot know the impact of peatlands on climate change in the world,” said Thalasso, who referred to this bias between rich and poor countries, which many experts call “scientific colonialism.”

The Cape Horn International Center for Studies of Global Change and Biocultural Conservation (CHIC, in its acronym in English) inaugurated on May 15 new facilities in Puerto Williams, the southernmost city of Chile, from where it intends to unravel the knowledge of the nature that hides the south of Chile and reduce that gap.

Both Thalasso and Salas collaborate with CHIC, but both agree that their research is still in its infancy: although both work in areas already developed in the northern hemisphere, science is still years away from knowing the specific impact of beavers or peat bogs at the extreme South Latin America on a global scale.

Source: EFE