Climate Chaos

The Frog Pond #34: Beavers create soggy safe zones

This month's Frog Pond features the engineering and fire protection prowess of the humble beaver!

Welcome, September! So begins my favourite months of the year!

News:

I am officially a USA TODAY BESTSELLING AUTHOR!
My guest post about my research and inspiration when writing A FATE WORSE THAN DROWNING is live on Barnes & Noble's blog!
A FATE WORSE THAN DROWNING is featured in the Goodreads list Summer Encore: Don’t Miss These Very Recent Hit Books
I have a few upcoming events in September/October that are getting ironed out. Check my events page on my website where I update as soon as I have final confirmed information!

Heads up that this month's Frog Pond deals with the topic of wildfires. It's more about an animal that helps prevent areas from burning, but in case anyone is particularly sensitive to that topic you may want to skip down to the updates section. Nothing at all graphic, but I know especially in recent years this can be a tough subject to read about.

The beaver: Engineer and fire prevention expert

A study in 2025 by Stanford University and the University of Minnesota analyzed 1,500 beaver ponds across the western United States. They found that the size, dam length, stream power, and surrounding vegetation weren't random. They followed predictable patterns to reshape waterways to benefit not only the beavers themselves, but also help ensure resiliency in the ecosystem¹.

Beaver dams can slow the flow of water in streams and rivers, spreading the water out to create flood plains and more lush habitats with much more water in the soil. Because of the concentration of water, these areas can endure much better during wildfires and droughts².

The study included aerial and satellite imagery of areas with beaver dams, which showed a system of dams that could create ponds in clusters, know as a "beaver pond complex"¹.

Different ecosystems demanded different complex patterns. The Northwestern mountains region generally had smaller ponds, while the wetlands created by dams on the Great Plains were much bigger thanks to the availability of land and water flow².

Slowing fires, saving animals, staying soggy: All in a day's work for the humble beaver

Because these complexes create such vast areas of wet, green land, they create a "speed bump" effect on wildfires, giving local wildlife a shelter and a spot for flora to grow back from in areas that become too damaged to naturally bounce back on their own².

But how does the beaver's hard work help? When waterways like rivers and streams erode into deeper, single channels, often monocultures of invasive vegetation can take over along the banks³. When a beaver builds a dam out of branches, mud, stones, and vegetation and digs new channels it can create a pond, which can help slow the speed of the water, reduce the invasive species, increase groundwater recharge⁴, as well as wet the soil so that native trees and shrubs can spread and thrive³. This creates a win-win to allow maturing vegetation to spread while still reducing fire risk.

A study by the California State University Channel Islands found that riparian areas (transition zones between land and rivers/lakes/streams/wetlands) with beaver damming experienced only 19% reduction of Normalized Vegetation Difference Index (NVDI, basically the amount of plant green-ness) during fires, compared to non-beaver dammed riparian areas that experienced a 51% reduction of NVDI⁵. This shows how beaver-dammed areas function differently during fires, allowing wetland creatures such as fish, frog, and salamanders to wait out fires much easier⁵.

A study of California's Sierra Nevada, an area with a high risk of wildfires and droughts, found that beaver dams have the potential to store 120 million meters cubed of surface water and create 2,200 kilometres squared of fire resilience in high fire risk areas⁶.

An extra post-fire bonus: Filtration station

Beaver wetlands also trap ash, sediment, and other debris that washes down the water system from burned areas. This helps prevent widespread pollution to improve the water quality, acting as a kind of filtration system⁴. This reduces the risk of algae blooms and protects vulnerable drinking water⁴.

Due to how spread out the water held by the wetlands is, this system also helps reduce the risk of flash floods that are common after severe wildfires⁴.

Take a moment and consider how lucky we are to live in a world with an animal like the beaver. They never needed to do all that, but they do!

How we can learn and do our part for a problem we've caused

These strips of vegetation along beaver ponds are essential, naturally engineered solutions to a problem the scale of which beavers were never meant to face. While wildfires are a natural part of ecosystems across the world, the lack of wetlands in North America is one contributing factor to their scope growing out of control⁴. While these complexes of pond can be helpful on smaller scales, the intensity and size of wildfires now can still overwhelm the beavers' ingenuity². Fragmenting the landscape to remove fuel in strategic areas, as these wetlands serve to do, may become a key tactic for firefighters. By using these ponds as "anchor points", staging operations and slowing the spread may be better managed².

Many laws throughout North America have outdated views on beavers as pests, making it harder for ecologically minded groups to support beaver activity⁴. Taking wisdom from the natural design may give scientists, ecologists, and anyone interested in maintaining forests another sustainable tool to consider when fighting the climate crisis-caused mass wildfires that are becoming the new norm across vast sections of North America.

Relocation and/or reintroduction efforts are not currently being considered by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry in Ontario given the abundance of beavers in the area². I'll be interested to see if there are efforts by governments in areas with fewer beavers to try and grow the complex pond networks through beaver interventions!

A word from a passing frog

August was a month of publishing excitement, deadline-meeting, and finally enjoying a little summer downtime.

Publishing

I had the best surprise this past month: A FATE WORSE THAN DROWNING is a USA Today Bestseller!!! For two weeks in a row!!

Making a national bestseller list is obviously huge enough - an awesome achievement for any author, but especially for debut authors! Only a small fraction can get on a very crowded list beside both contemporary huge titles and classics. I mean, The Odyssey is on there! For a lot of authors, the bestseller list can happen on their first week in no small part because of a large push for pre-orders that count in your first week of sales. When I didn't get on the list for my first week, I was a little disappointed but ultimately understood how rare it was to get on.

Then I get a message from a fellow debut author to check the list, on a Wednesday 3 whole weeks after my launch. I'd stopped checking! I thought I'd had my chance, didn't make it, and was happy to move on with a few more local events and hope it was a slow-and-steady type of book. But there I was, #117 of the most bought books in the US. My little book! My historical fantasy Nova Scotian corner of the world! Up there with the Big Books! A large portion of the push came from being a Barnes & Noble Speculative Our Monthly Pick. It was so cool to see so many people at stores across North America sharing their excitement for my book, I never thought that would translate into something so momentous!

The next Wednesday rolled around. And there I was, #62. Higher than the week before! I'd made the bestseller list twice in a row! Frankly, and I know I'm already making this seem like a huge deal, it's a huge. ass. deal. This doesn't tend to happen to debut books, unless they get picked up in a BookTok craze or a celebrity shouts them out, stuff like that.

Before my ego flies too close to the sun, don't worry: It's not "quit my job" kind of stuff (yet). It's amazing, and a really great sign for my future books! It very likely means I'll earn out my advance. But there a lot more security/consistency needed before I ever go full-time. Just the fact that this could be in my future is wildly beyond my expectations!!

And you knew it was coming: Thank you. To everyone who has bought, loaned, talked about, or simply followed along with the book: It's one book out of thousands upon thousands that have been published this year, but it's my book and I'm so grateful that you've taken the time to care about it. It truly means the world to me.

Writing

I passed in my first draft of my second book!!! It was a mad dash to the finish for my mid-August deadline. I wrote 15,000 words on the last day alone. Madness! I also found a lot of joy in the last couple days while wrapping up the draft. It's so easy to fall into a lot of fear of disappointing, but something clicked in those final hours that made me care a little less about perfection and a whole lot more about just getting words from brain to fingertips to page.

I'm currently working on the research stage (aka my favourite stage) for my third book. Yes! A third book! I'll stay pretty quiet about it for now. There's a couple potential project I'm digging into. I'm taking some of the lessons from the second book's drafting experience. Primarily, I'm learning how to parse down many chaotic ideas into something manageable for one book's length. Maybe. Stay tuned.

Reading

This month I read The Heresy of Thieves by Mia Moss (coming out October 6, pre-order here!!), The History of Rome: The Republic by Mike Duncan, and The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook (book #3 of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series). The first was my second requested blurb (nails emoji here), the second was a podcast series from 2007, and the third was my bedtime ritual book.

If you're looking for a book to support this fall and love fantasy full of wit and wiles, I highly recommend checking out Mia's book! Their take on a fantasy world that has lost its connection to magic, and the many groups desperate to seize control in the resulting chaotic era, is full of personality and stellar worldbuilding. This is the first book in the Spellfall series.

I'm currently juggling two books on my TBR list: The historical horror The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones and the romantasy The Iron Hex by Victoria S. Walsh. I got to meet Victoria in February during Winter Institute. She's a fellow Canadian author (and fellow USA Today Bestselling author!!) and such a sweetheart! I'm really digging her book. I don't have a lot of experience reading in the romantasy genre yet (more recs welcome!) but it's been such a fun read and has me looking forward to finding book time! The way she's tangling together the threads of each narrator is so impressive to me and a testament to her voice/style.