Rebecca Olson, M.S.
Rebecca is the owner and president of Olson Ecological Solutions, LLC. Her work protects, enhances, and creates natural areas and encourages human interaction with nature in various ways. She has played a significant role in preserve planning and preservation of over 1,200 acres of natural areas in northern Illinois. She has secured and administered over $4.7 million for local land planning, conservation, and restoration projects. The projects that she develops and manages provide natural areas in rural and developed settings like river corridors, drainage systems, wetlands, parks, and neighborhoods. Rebecca attended Denison University for her Bachelor of Arts in biology and minor in chemistry. She then received her Master of Science in wildlife biology from Colorado State University. She moved to Rockford in 2000. Prior to Olson Ecological Solutions, she served as the Director of Land Preservation for the Natural Land Institute and assisted in natural area restoration with the Winnebago County Forest Preserve District. Rebecca has served on several board of directors focused on ecological conservation and neighborhood development and currently serves on the Natural Land Institute Land Conservation Committee and Executive Committee of the Keith Parent Association. She has been married to her husband, Scott, for 10 years and has two children.
Shannon Thruman, B.A.
Shannon has been working for Olson Ecological Solutions for three years as a field ecologist. Shannon assists with plant surveys, the technical aspects of restoration, and grant research. Shannon has been volunteering and working in the restoration business for 20 years. Shannon received her her bachelors degree in 1996 in human ecology from The College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. Since 2000, Shannon’s career has focused on exclusively on native plants of the midwest when she moved to Rockford to work at the Nature Conservancy’s Nachusa Grassland collecting seeds for a ten-acre restoration and the Natural Land Institute as the nursery manager/volunteer coordinator. Shannon bought Enders Greenhouse in Cherry Valley at the end of 2001 where she grew and sold native plants until she sold the greenhouse in 2006. Shannon is an active birder, and in the past she has served on the Northwest Illinois Audubon Society board, and the College of the Atlantic Student Committee board.
Olson Ecological Solutions LLC P.O. Box 4631 Rockford, IL 61110 815/985-2689