Forestry Women Who Rock: Edie Dooley – Episode 32

Edie Dooley is a field forester stewarding a 12,500 acre family forest in Western Oregon with one of the America’s oldest forestry consulting companies, Mason, Bruce and Girard.

Prior to finding her way into this dream job she worked with MBG out of Portland, OR as a forest analyst performing forest inventory analysis and updates, running large cruise jobs including managing the cruise of the Oregon’s Elliott State forest in 2015, and working on fast turnaround due diligence cruise jobs.

Two years ago, while living in Portland, Edie founded the Free to Grow Coalition, a networking group for the next generation of leaders in forest work aimed holding casual meet ups to have real talk about forestry’s joys as well as its challenges. Edie has held a large breadth of forestry and conservation jobs including serving as an urban conservation crew leader with the Student Conservation Association, three Forest Service technician seasons in botany, a fire ecology research and silviculture, a USDA National Needs Fellow forestry master’s student conducting research on disturbance ecology and multi-trophic level interactions with whitebark pine, mountain pine beetles and white pine blister rust, and as Montana DNRC’s urban forest inventory program specialist conducting surveys of publicly owned urban trees throughout Montana’s communities.

While paid to be a forester, Edie is an ecologist at heart with an honors B.S. in biology focused on ecology and evolution from Syracuse University where she conducted an undergraduate thesis on the effects of anthropogenic sound on bird song.

She completed her Master’s in Forestry at University of Montana in 2012. Having grown up in a small town in New York state, and eventually living in Portland, Oregon, Edie is loving settling into the country life in the Willamette Valley in Oregon where she lives with her partner who is also a forestry consultant. She has also started a new Free To Grow Coalition group for her forestry peers in the Salem, Oregon area.

She enjoys skiing, yoga, travel, rock climbing, aerial silks, gardening, bird watching and being a feminist.