Join us for the 38th Annual Summer Lecture Series, held on Wednesday nights in July and August at 7 p.m. This free event is held in the Norm Dicks Visitor Center Auditorium. Doors open at 6:30 p.m., and attendance is limited to 100. On July 16, Dr. Greg Hood will reveal habitat use by beaver in the tidal marshes of the Skagit and Snohomish deltas, focusing on the distribution of their dams and lodges, the role of their dams for tidal beaver, and the effects of their dams on juvenile salmon and other small estuarine fish. In addition, he'll discuss the special case of beaver in the Copper River Delta of Alaska, where tidal marshes were elevated by 2 meters in the 1964 earthquake (magnitude 9.2).
Dr. Hood is a senior research scientist for the Skagit River System Cooperative, a natural resources management agency serving the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community and the Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe. He has been working for more than thirty years in Pacific Northwest wetlands, but he has also had the good fortune to dabble in tidal marshes in Chile and the Atlantic coast of France. His research focuses on the interaction between geomorphology and ecology in tidal wetlands with application to habitat restoration and recovery of threatened Chinook salmon. Ecological interactions of interest, in addition to juvenile salmon and other estuarine fish, have included marsh vegetation, benthic invertebrates, and tidal beaver. He has taught Landscape Ecology of Wetlands for eight years in the Professional Certification Program at the University of Washington. For twelve years he served as a panel member on the Columbia River Expert Regional Technical Group on Estuary Habitat Actions, which advises the National Marine Fisheries Service, US Army Corps of Engineers, and Bonneville Power Administration on federal estuarine habitat actions for Chinook salmon recovery in the Columbia River Estuary. He is also a founding member of the Skagit Climate Science Consortium. He has a PhD from the University of Washington School of Fisheries and an MS from the Florida State University.