UWEC CERCA 2025

Anthropogenic changes are expected to influence behavior, stress physiology, and ultimately, lifetime fitness of animals. For social animals, external stressors imposed by human activities may interact with the social environment to either exacerbate or buffer stressors. In the context of human-induced rapid environmental change, long-term data on individually recognized social mammals has the potential to offer novel insights into the extent to which organisms can cope with social and ecological stressors. In this research, we established a new project focused on the behavioral ecology of North American beavers (Castor canadensis), a native ecosystem engineer, through monitoring using camera traps. We surveyed various public lands and identified several active family groups of beavers in West-Central Wisconsin. Our camera trap data indicate that the behavioral patterns and their interactions with other local fauna vary temporally within days and across seasons. Future research will focus on their social behaviors, including their monogamous lifestyles, dominance structures, communication systems, and movement ecology. The plethora of wildlife we monitored on our camera traps illustrates how beavers play a key role in shaping diverse and healthy wetland ecosystems. This research therefore has important implications for the management of wetlands and conservation of beaver populations in the region.