Steve MacDonald

Dr. Macdonald is the head of the Freshwater Ecosystems Section in the Science Branch of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. His section investigates a wide variety of freshwater habitat-related issues associated within the fields of forestry, placer mining, industrial pollution, agriculture, and water reservoir withdrawal. Section staff have skills in ecology, limnology, ethology, stock assessment, biological modeling, and biometrics. Dr. Macdonald and his staff provide scientific advice to stock assessment and habitat management staff within and outside of Fisheries and Oceans. Advice is provided in the form of legal affidavits, ministerial briefing documents, applied research proposals, extension activities, and resource management referrals.

Dr. Macdonald is a fisheries research scientist with primary research interests in the field of trophic ecology and habitat science. His current research involves the investigation of ecosystem processes in watersheds subjected to forest harvesting in the interior of British Columbia. In particular, he is interested in the influence of land-based activities on water temperature and the application of this information to protecting and managing all freshwater life stages of salmonids. He has designed and managed several multi-disciplinary research projects, the latest being the Stuart-Takla Fish/Forestry Interaction Project which involves representatives from universities, federal and provincial government agencies, the forest industry, and First Nations (Can. Tech. Rep. Fish. Aquat. Sci. 1899; Can. Tech. Rep. Fish. Aquat. Sci. 2007).

Dr. Macdonald has a B.Sc. in Biological Sciences from Simon Fraser University and a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Western Ontario. He has been a research scientist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, in the Freshwater Ecosystems Section, since 1982. Dr. Macdonald has taught graduate and undergraduate level courses in a variety of disciplines at the Bamfield Marine Station, the University of Western Ontario, and internationally for IDRC in Wuxi, China. He is an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Forestry at the University of British Columbia and the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University. He is currently supervising several graduate students.