I'm Auriel Fournier (she/her), I'm an Assistant Waterfowl/Wetland Bird Ecologist at the Illinois Natural History Survey, and the Director of Forbes Biological Station.
I’m an applied conservation ecologist, which basically means that I do scientific work to solve a problem or answer a question that comes from the natural resource management community. Usually, that involves at least two of three things: birds, wetlands or decision making.
As an ornithologist, I model the migratory connectivity of birds and work to better understand when they migrate and where. My favorite birds, hands down, are the rails.
As an quanitative ecologist, I use complex statistical models to account for the natural variation in the system to better understand if the management action or process at hand is influencing things.
As a field ecologist, I spend a lot of time getting ATVs unstuck, and fixing them, while also designing new survey methodologies for some of the most elusive birds.
As a collaborator, I believe in transparent reproducible science but even more I believe in collaborative science. I believe in science that engages the people who will be using the results to inform their decisions, be they funding decision makers or wetland managers. I want to do good science, but even more I want that science to be useful. I have extensive experience leading teams across organizational, discipline and political boundaries.
As a passionate advocate for a more diverse scientific community I am always interested in studying the impacts of our assumptions in the scientific career path. Currently this focuses on the impacts of unpaid labor.
Feel free to contact me with any questions at auriel@illinois.edu, or on twitter @RallidaeRule