Allyson Menzies

I grew up in Manitoba, Treaty 1 and 2 territory and the homeland of the Metis Nation. I completed both my BSc and MSc degrees at the University of Winnipeg, studying bat behaviour, hibernation energetics, and disease ecology. I completed my PhD at McGill University in 2021, spending the majority of that time living in and learning from the boreal forest of southwestern Yukon. For my PhD, I used small animal-borne dataloggers to monitor activity, heart rate, and body temperature of boreal mammals (lynx, snowshoe hares, red squirrels) to understand how they tolerate and adapt to variation in their environment. I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Guelph, working in partnership with Nature United and Indigenous Nations across Canada to identify values that are inherent to the ways they care for the land. I am also applying what we learn to developing moose monitoring tools for First Nations that prioritize these values and weaving both Indigenous and Western ways of knowing. Being of both Metis and Settler ancestry, I am passionate about using my platform and skillset to challenge, through interdisciplinary and collaborative research, how natural sciences, Indigenous Knowledge, and political agendas interact in a conservation science context.