Enhancing Species Richness

an overhead image shows a brown beaver swimming through still water

Biological Strategy

American beaver

AskNature Team

Image: Braedon McLeod / Unsplash / Some rights reserved

Maintain Biodiversity

The greater the amount of genetic and species variation in an ecosystem, the more resilient that ecosystem is to disturbances. Variation in ecosystems across the Earth also contributes to the Earth’s resilience to unpredictable changes. This variation is called biodiversity. Because living systems compete with each other for scarce resources, maintaining biodiversity involves creating conditions for a large variety of species to successfully co-occur and reproduce. For example, within a wetland, there are different vegetation types. This diversity results in a complex mosaic of microenvironments as the vegetation types alter air flows, light regimes, and water temperatures and chemistry. Because organisms vary in their ideal environmental conditions, these micro-environments increase the diversity of plants in the wetland. In turn, having a wetland in an otherwise dry area increases biodiversity at an even larger scale.

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Mammals

Class Mammalia (“breast”): Bats, cats, whales, horses, humans

Mammals make up less than 1% of all animals on earth, but they include some of the most well-known species. We know first-hand some of the characteristics that make mammals unique, like having hair, being able to sweat, and producing milk through mammary glands. Another critical shared feature is a set of highly-specialized teeth. Unlike sharks or alligators, for example, whose teeth are generally all the same size and shape, mammals have differently shaped teeth in different areas of the jaws to target specific foods or foraging strategies.

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Beavers enhance species richness in their environments by increasing habitat heterogeneity.

Image: Gary Colet /

A beaver pond creates new habitat types by changing the hydrologic regime. Beaver populations come and go, making for a dynamic habitat.

Image: Michelle H /

Beaver ponds from above, showing habitat heterogeneity.

Image: Wikimedia Commons /

Beaver lodge north of Saguenay, Quebec

Image: Moxfyre / Wikimedia Commons /

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Image: Ron Dunnington /

“Many organisms modulate the availability of resources to other species by causing state changes in or materials (ecosystem engineering), in the process frequently changing the selection to which the ecosystem engineers and other organisms are exposed (niche construction)…Jones and colleagues (1997) hypothesized that at a scale encompassing unmodified or ‘virgin’ habitats, engineered habitats, and degraded areas abandoned by engineers, the net effect of ecosystem engineering should be to enhance species richness via a net increase in habitat diversity. Recent studies provide support for this hypothesis. For example, natural sites with and without beavers (Castor canadensis) exhibit low overlap in species composition. By increasing habitat heterogeneity, beavers increased herbaceous plant species numbers by more than 33% (Wright et al. 2002).” (Boogert 2006:570, 574)