The North American Beaver (Castor canadensis) changes its landscape by felling mainly hardwood trees, thereby impounding moving water to create flooded, low-energy systems that cause stress to impacted floodplain trees. These impacts are episodic and cyclical, with dams typically standing for one or more decades. Therefore, reconstructing the history of beaver influence in a system over time can be important for understanding long-term ecosystem dynamics. Commonly used methods to age beaver impoundments involve removing and aging wood at the base of dam structures, which is destructive and not possible in sensitive systems. Here, we propose and test a non-invasive way to estimate timing of flood events by assessing standing softwood stress using methods in dendrochronology. In an Adirondack hardwood forest, we sampled three beaver ponds over an age gradient, from intact dams to breached dams, to historically dammed reaches. At 150-meter increments along the streams, transects (n=45) were surveyed to obtain tree species and crown class information. In riparian areas of each site, softwoods were cored upstream and downstream of impounded areas (i.e., low-energy and high-energy sites, respectively). Tree cores were analyzed using skeleton plotting to determine years of stress (i.e., decreased annual growth) over time. Overall, we observed a significant difference in the proportion of softwood trees between low energy (71% softwood) and high-energy (37% softwood) reaches (p=0.004). In addition, we observed a clear pattern of softwood stress: we saw evidence of increased stress in low-energy segments and decreased stress in high-energy segments. This pattern likely indicates a flooding event while similar stress levels in adjacent high- and low-energy segments indicates a major impoundment breach. These findings agreed with estimated flood timings found using satellite imagery. Preliminary results indicate a new potential method for determining the hydrological history of streams and their riparian zones in systems engineered by beavers.