Data for: Ancient sedimentary DNA shows more than 5000 years of continuous beaver occupancy in Grand Teton National Park

Beaver-based restoration is emerging as a cost-effective conservation and climate adaptation strategy, but efforts are constrained by limited knowledge of pre-colonial beaver distribution and their long-term ecosystem impacts. Here, we apply sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) techniques to investigate the history of beaver occupancy at three lakes in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, over the last ~10 ka, as well as interactions with the local plant community. To investigate change in the vascular plant community, extracts were PCR amplified using barcode primers targeting the trnL P6 loop of the plant chloroplast genome with five replicates per DNA extract. A barcode targeting the 16S region of the mammalian mitochondrial genome (16SmammP007) was also amplified and sequenced from a subset of samples to validate beaver presence results from the species-species qPCR assay. trnL metabarcoding showed differing plant communities in the two lower-elevation lakes as compared to the high..., , # Data for: Ancient sedimentary DNA shows more than 5000 years of continuous beaver occupancy in Grand Teton National Park

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.cc2fqz6j9](10.5061/dryad.cc2fqz6j9)

## Description of the data and file structure

Dataset includes two Microsoft Excel files (SI_tableS4_trnl_rawdata.xlsx and SI_tableS5_P007_rawdata.xlsx) summarizing raw metabarcode sequencing data\
generated from sedimentary ancient DNA associated with the Ecosphere publication: 

Ancient sedimentary DNA shows more than 5000 years of continuous beaver occupancy in Grand Teton National Park. 2025. D. Nevé Baker, Darren J. Larsen, Emily Fairfax, Amelia P. Muscott, Beth Shapiro, Sarah E. Crump.

Each data file contains sequencing reads that have been trimmed and processed with the Anacapa QC pipeline ([https://github.com/limey-bean/Anacapa](https://github.com/limey-bean/Anacapa)), then clustered as Amplicon Sequence Variants (ASVs). Taxonomy was then assigned by aligning ASV clusters to the NCBI nr/nt d...,