SYMPOSIUM PRESENTER CO-AUTHOR: Paul Frater (Wisconsin DNR) TITLE: Beaver monitoring in Wisconsin ABSTRACT: Beaver have existed and changed landscapes in what is now Wisconsin for centuries. Concurrently, beaver have been harvested for their meat and fur, first by Native Americans and then—likely in much higher numbers—by Europeans as part of the fur trade. In this talk, we discuss the past and present monitoring of beaver in Wisconsin as conducted by Wisconsin DNR (WDNR), the state entity charged with managing and monitoring beaver and other furbearer species. Since 1930, WDNR has collected statewide metrics of beaver harvest pressure from annual harvest estimates along with pelt price records. For the last 35 years, WDNR has surveyed fur trappers to obtain finer-scale information about the estimated number of beaver trappers, beaver harvest data, and catch-per-unit-effort metrics to infer beaver population abundance. Within the last 10 years, WDNR has initiated a community science statewide trail camera project called Snapshot Wisconsin, and from this nowproduces spatial and temporal trends for beaver that are updated annually. Snapshot Wisconsin has provided increasingly comprehensive data on the distribution and direction of beaver populations in the state, and methodological advances in harvest estimation allow us to dial in harvest monitoring efforts. These data sources combined help fine-tune knowledge about beaver populations and harvest in the state and drive better usage of information to manage this important keystone species. BIO: Jennifer Stenglein is a research scientist at Wisconsin DNR. She has worked there on the Snapshot Wisconsin project for 12 years, seeing the project from its beginning to now having 100+ million photos. Jennifer earned her PhD from UW-Madison and master’s degree from the University of Idaho, both projects working on wolves.