Reclamation - restoring disturbed lands

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We Built Fake Beaver Dams to Rewild this Dead River (yt.artemislena.eu)

submitted 1 year ago by Rozauhtuno@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/reclamation@slrpnk.net

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[–] Treevan@aussie.zone 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nice. Good luck.

In Australia, we call them "leaky weirs" (check dams too) as beavers don't exist and they were popularised by Natural Sequence Farming and Peter Andrews with great effect. Don't let the name fool you, they aren't that leaky and are built similarly to this vid.

I don't know if I like the term beaver dam as it's a bit exclusionary but if it works for clicks and techniques for the northern hemisphere, that's cool.

I've just included some old videos, NSF has been around for a long time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbaSL94NBcw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwnT8IrWNYQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fayywpnFBAA

And the dude himself explaining why more recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUDxycp7ayk

Playlist with more (80 videos) if anyone interested:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE-d88mKVNvCLWK0_m46vHoQGXfT5T-S4

[–] rhythmisaprancer@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don’t know if I like the term beaver dam as it’s a bit exclusionary

Can you help me pick up what you're putting down here?

Thank you both for sharing these videos, really cool stuff, makes me think about this gem from almost ten years ago now.

[–] Treevan@aussie.zone 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not every country has beavers. Weir is already the word used in English to define what is happening here.

Ahh yes, the original swale. Probably caused more small scale earthworks than anything?

[–] rhythmisaprancer@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Very fair! I had friends working in Australia for some time but never visited, my loss. It really sounded interesting and different.

Ya, possibly. I would think that earlier people, as observant as they were, were building swales long ago in Persia or North Africa. Or SW USA. Or Australia.

[–] Treevan@aussie.zone 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Not that I'm an expert or anything, but I don't know if Aus' First Nations harnessed water for agriculture like that. What they did do was make amazing fish traps and eel farms. The fact they could place rocks in a river for trapping purposes and have them not wash away, ever, blows my mind.

A big fallen Euc is all the swale you need. They are still visible in rivers and gullies, even though the forest is long gone around them.