December Lecture: Beavers: Engineering Their Way to Biodiversity

Date: Dec 07, 2025 at 14:30
Meeting Location: Zoom Meeting

Join us on Sunday, December 7, 2025 at 2:30 PM via Zoom for our December lecture. Zoom details below.

Beavers catch people’s attention. Ponds created behind a beaver dam host notably high levels of biodiversity, contribute to surface and groundwater storage, and are just one of the few engineered features that beavers create. Whether it be their formidable lodges, extensive dam networks, or excavated canals, beavers change landscapes like very few other animals. Each one of these beaver-engineered structures plays a special role in our environment and act as special habitat features for many species. However, their engineering prowess can negatively impact human infrastructure in costly ways. This talk explores the role beavers play in nature, while also examining how humans might counter some of the difficulties in having such an energetic and resourceful animal as a neighbour.

Glynnis Hood is a Professor Emerita and ecologist at the University of Alberta and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Saskatchewan. Her research interests include aquatic ecology, wildlife biology, and human-wildlife interactions. For more than 20 years, Glynnis has integrated her research on beaver ecology with more focused studies of beaver management to enhance human-wildlife coexistence. She is the author of Semi-aquatic Mammals: Ecology and Biology, The Beaver Manifesto, and  her first children’s book A Cabin Christmas. A second edition of The Beaver Manifesto entitled The Beaver Manifesto: Conservation, Conflict and the Future of Wetlands will be released in Fall 2025 by Rocky Mountain Books.

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Toronto Field Naturalists wishes to acknowledge this Land through which we walk. For thousands of years, the Land has been shared by the Wendat, the Haudenosaunee, and the Anishinaabe. Toronto is situated on the Land within the Toronto Purchase, Treaty 13, the traditional and treaty Lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. This territory is also part of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum, a covenant agreement between Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Wendat peoples and allied nations to peaceably share the land and all its resources. Today, the Land is home to peoples of numerous nations. We are all grateful to have the opportunity to continue to care for and share the beauty of this Land.