Advanced Training Opportunity Saturday, May 16, 1:30 pm, Sierra Vista Public Library

The Friends of San Pedro River and the Friends of the Huachuca Mountains are co-sponsoring a talk about beavers in the San Pedro River Valley.

The San Pedro River was called Beaver River by trappers in the early 1800s because it boasted and immense population of beavers and beaver dams. Known today as "nature's engineers", beavers had created marshes, or cienegas, all along the San Pedro River Valley. Beavers were trapped to extinction by the end of the 1800s, leading to the collapse of the ecological system that had existed along the river for centuries because of the beavers. Reintroduced in 1999, there has been a renewed interest in American Beaver  (Castor canadensis) along the San Pedro River. Dr. Steve Merkley and Mr. Frank Emanuele, biology instructors at Cochise College, will discuss the ecological importance and genetic diversity of this charismatic rodent. They will highlight impacts on native wildlife and discuss methods of using non-invasive DNA collection to explore beaver populations. Collected wood chips from beaver chewed trees have to be analyzed for mitochondrial DNA and this data has the potential to illustrate relationships between individuals within a colony.