Hi, I’m wondering if two water-related things can be interlinked accurately.

The first is the issue of road salt in North America and the growing salinity of our water. Road salt has contaminated surface and groundwater to the point where some streams now show higher levels of brine in the middle of summer, when they’re mostly fed by springs, rather than in first snowmelt when the runoff from roads and parking lots and driveways happens. I’ve found a few articles on phytoremediation but haven’t vetted them yet; other than that the only answer I know of for restoring soil and groundwater is flushing out the salt, eventually all the way to the ocean (and of course to stop adding more). Unfortunately, saltwater is heavier than freshwater so it accumulates in the lowest part of ponds, lakes, and aquifers.

I’m wondering if pond levelers could help here. They’re a contraption used to prevent beavers from raising the level of a body of water past a certain point. Typically they use a flexible pipe to pull water from above the dam, through the dam (humped up to the highest point humans want the water level to reach), and pour it down into the outflow stream/wetland. Ideally they’re quiet and don’t cause the beavers to keep looking for a leak, but at the very least they’re pretty impossible for a beaver to jam full of sticks and mud. This keeps the beavers from flooding their dangerous human neighbors so they don’t escalate to physical harm.

The idea I want to check is whether humans could work with beavers to siphon trapped saltwater from the bottom of a lake (and if there are any precautions you’d have to take). I’ve read about Beaver Dam Analogs and various systems for coexisting with beavers like pond levelers and diversion dams, but I’ve never worked on any of them. I don’t think pond levelers follow siphon rules but I’m not sure.