Shannon MacDonald

Shannon was born and raised in Ontario, spending most days exploring nature with her family.  She spent many summers wandering through the forests and moss covered rocks on the Bruce Peninsula, a place that holds a special place in her heart.  As a teenager, her love for exploring brought her to the French Alps where she lived in small villages for a year surrounded by magical alpine forests.  With a bug for travel, she moved to the East Coast of Canada after finishing high school.  There she completed her undergraduate degree, double majoring in Environment, Sustainability, & Society and Marine Biology at Dalhousie University.  Although her passion for land conservation was nurtured from childhood, her experience in land conservation started with her role as Stewardship Assistant with the Nova Scotia Nature Trust.  Primed with a deepened understanding of how precious natural ecosystems are, she decided to complete the Redfish School of Change program through the University of Victoria, where she learned valuable leadership and communication skills.

To improve her skills and better enable her to communicate the value of place, Shannon completed a post-graduate certificate at Fleming College to become a GIS Cartographic Specialist.  She then applied her skills as a Research Assistant at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Forestry where she worked on many exciting projects analyzing urban forest carbon stores using Vegetation Sampling Protocol (VSP) data.  She came into contact with EBC as a volunteer consultant completing a Forest Management Plan for EBC's properties.  Her skillset and passion for land conservation made her a perfect fit at EBC.  She has been the Conservation Coordinator for the region of Grey-Simcoe and all the projects in EBC's more southern areas since January 2021.