Monopoli, LF, Johnson, E, Lueck, J, Fournier, AMV, Benson, TJ, Woodrey, MS. 2024. First documented evidence of Eastern Black Rail Breeding in Louisiana, USA. Waterbirds 47:1-5 doi:10.1675/063.047.0204

Schmidt, SM, Osborn, JM, Benson, TJ, Fournier, AMV. 2024. Post-Fledgling survival and habitat use of juvenile Least Bitterns. Wilson Journal of Ornithology DOI: 10.1676/23-00106

Larson, LD, Jacques, CN, Lancaster, JD, Hagy, HM, Antea, MJ, Fournier, AMV 2024. True metabolizable energy of foods consumed by lesser scaup Wildlife Society Bulletin DOI: 10.1002/wsb.1548

Stantial, ML, Fournier, AMV, Lawson, AJ, Marcot, BG, Woodrey, MS, Lyons, JE. 2024. RE-ARMing Salt Marshes: A Resilience-Experimentalist Approach to Prescribed Fire and Bird Conservation in High Marshes of the Gulf of Mexico Frontiers in Conservation Science 5 DOI: 10.3389/fcosc.2024.1426646

Gilbert, AD, Yetter, AP, Hine, CS, Lancaster, JD, Osborn, JM, Kross, CC, Fournier, AMV. 2024. Postbreeding ecology of wood ducks in the Illinois River Valley Journal of Wildlife Management doi:10.1002/jwmg.22670

(Position is now closed)

Davis, O, Molano-Flores, B, Li, YW, Allen, ML, Mengelkoch, JM, Parkos, JJ, Porreca, AP, Fournier, AMV, Stodola, AP, Tiemann, J, Breid, J, Marcum, PB, Carroll-Cunningman, CJ, Janssen, ED, Ulaszek, EF, McIntyre, SM, Jog, S, Price, EPF, Nieset, J, Beveroth, T, Di Giovanni, A, Askren, RJ, Malanchuk, LJ, Duquette, JF, Dreslik, MJ, McElrath, TC, Taft, JB, Stodola, K, Malcom, J, Carter, A, Evansen, M, Gerber, L. 2024. Tracking Species Recovery Status to Improve Endangered Species Act Decisions Conservation Science and Practice 10.111/csp2.13159

Beach, CR, Jacques, CN, Lancaster, JD, Osborne, DC, Yetter, AP, Cole, RA, Hagy, HM, Fournier, AMV. 2024. Lessons learned from using wild-caught and captive-reared lesser scaup (Aythya affinis) in captive experiments Translational Animal Science. 10.1093/tas/txae076

I’m excited to share that I’ve been promoted to Associate Research Scientist at the Illinois Natural History Survey!

Schmidt, SM, Fournier, AMV, Osborn, JM, Benson, TJ. 2023 Water Depth Influences Survival and Predator-Specific Patterns of Nest Loss in Three Secretive Marsh Bird Species Ecology and Evolution 13:e10823.

Enwright, NM, Cheyney, WC, Evans, KO, Thurman, HR, Woodrey, MS, Fournier, AMV, Moon, JA, Levy, H, Cox, J, Kappes, PJ, Nyman, AJ, Pitchford, JL. 2023 Mapping high marsh and salt pannes/flats along the northern Gulf of Mexico coast Geocarto International doi: 10.1080/10106049.2023.2285354

Yannuzzi, Sally, Beach, Cheyenne, Kemink, Kaylan, Fournier, Auriel, Ellis-Felege, Susan. 2023 Fowl Women: Often unsung, women have made multifaceted contributions to waterfowl conservation The Wildlife Professional 17:4

Brewer, DE, Gehring, TM, Garcia, MM, Shirkey, BT, Simpson, BW, Fournier, AMV 2023. King Rail home range and microhabitat characteristics in western Lake Erie coastal marshes Ecology and Evolution 13:310043 doi: 10.1002/ece3.10043

Stantial, ML, Lawson, AJ, Fournier, AMV, Kappes, PJ, Kross, CS, Runge, MC, Woodrey, MS, Lyons, JE. 2023 Qualitative value of information provides a transparent and repeatable method for identifying critical uncertainty Ecological Applications doi: 10.1002/eap.2824

Kross, CS, Rohli, RV, Moon, JA, Fournier, AMV, Woodrey, MS, Nyman, JA. 2023. Preferred atmospheric circulations associated with favorable prescribed burns in the Gulf of Mexico coast, USA Fire Ecology doi: 10.1186/s42408-023-00169-4

Fournier, AMV, Wilson, RR, Gleason, JS, Adams, EM, Brush, JM, Cooper, RJ, DeMaso, SJ, Driscoll, MJL, Frederick, PC, Jodice, PGR, Ottinger, MA, Reeves, DB, Seymour, MA, Sharuga, SM, Tirpak, JM, Vermillion, WG, Zenzal, TJ, Lyons, JE, Woodrey, MS. Structured Decision Making To Prioritize Regional Bird Monitoring Needs INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics doi: 10.1287/inte.2022.1154

Enwright, NM, Cheney, WC, Evans, KO, Thurman, HR, Woodrey, MS, Fournier, AMV, Gesh, DB, Pitchford, JL, Stoker, JM, Medeiros, SC. Elevation-based probabilistic mapping of irregularly flooded wetlands along the northern Gulf of Mexico coast Remote Sensing of Environment 287:113451 doi: 0.1016/j.rse.2023.113451

Holiman, H, Kitaif, JC, Fournier, AMV, Iglay, RB, Woodrey, MS. Using autonomous recording units to detect individual marsh birds in the Northern Gulf of Mexico. INHS Bulletin 43:2022002. DOI: 10.21900/j.inhs.v43.866

Fournier, AMV, Bradshaw, TM, Hagy, HM, Shirkey, B. In Press. To improve existing marsh bird survey protocols, we need to evaluate closure assumptions Wildlife Society Bulletin e1410 doi: 10.1002/wsb.1410

Askren, RJ, Eichholz, MW, Sharp, CM, Washburn, BE, Beckerman, SF, Pullins, CK, Fournier, AMV, Vonbank, JA, Weegman, MD, Hagy, HM, Ward, MP. 2022. Behavioral responses of Canada geese to winter harassment in the context of human-wildlife conflicts Wildlife Society Bulletin e1384 doi: 10.1002/wsb.1384

Kitaif, JC , Holiman, H , Fournier, AMV, Iglay, RB, WOodrey, MS. 2022. Trends in Rail Migration Arrival and Departure Times Using Long-Term Citizen Science Data from Mississippi, USA Waterbirds 45:108-112 doi: 10.1675/063.045.0113

Stuber, EF, Robinson, O, Bjerre, E, Otto, Mk, Millsap, B, Zimmerman, G, Brasher, MG, Ringelman, KM, Fournier, AMV, Yetter, A, Isola, JE, Ruiz-Gutierrez, V. 2022 The potential of semi-structured citizen science data as a supplement for conservation decision-making: Validating the performance of eBird against targeted avian monitoring efforts Biological Conservation 10.1016/j.biocon.2022.109556

Really honored to be receiving the 2022 Early Career Investigator Award from the Prairie Research Institute!

The literature on unpaid work in ecology/STEM is growing, and I’ll try to keep this updated as a resource for folks who want to find all this great work.

Klimas, ST #, Osborn, JM, Yetter, AP, Lancaster, JD, Jacques, CN, Fournier, AMV, Hagy, HM. 2022. Food selection by spring-migrating green-winged teal Journal of Fish and Wildlife Management. 10.3996/JFWM-21-075

This position is now closed

Fournier, AMV, Wilson, RR, Lyons, JE, Gleason, JS, Adams, EM, Barnhill, LM, Brush, JM, Cooper, RJ, DeMaso, SJ, Driscoll, MJL, Eaton, MJ, Frederick, PC, Just, MG, Seymour, MA, Tirpak, JM, and Woodrey, MS, 2021 Structured decision making and optimal bird monitoring in the northern Gulf of Mexico U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2020–1122, 62 p., https://doi.org/10.3133/ofr20201122.

I originally wrote this post in 2017, you can read the original version here.

Saunders, SP, Wu, JX, Adams, E, Bateman, B, Bayard, T, Beilke, S, Dayer, A, Fournier, AMV, Fox, K, Gow, EA, Heglund, P, Lerman, SB, Michel, NL, Paxton, E, CekercioAlu, AH, Smith, MA, Thogmartin, W, Woodrey, MS, van Riper, C. 2021 Bridging the research-implementation gap in avian conservation with translational ecology. Ornithological Applications (formerly The Condor) 10.1093/ornithapp/duab018

I was honored to recieve the USFWS Regional Director’s Honor Award for Conservation Partner along with many of my fine colleagues in the Gulf of Mexico Avian Monitoring Network (GoMAMN). More details here

I was elected the 2nd Vice President of the Wilson Ornithological Society this past weekend and will be searching the society and those who study and conserve birds more broadly for the next two years.

I gave a talk at the Northeast Natural History Conference this past weekend, which is also the joint meeting of the Wilson Ornithological Society and Association of Field Ornithologists this year.

The Society for Marine Mammalogy invited me to present and be a part of a panel discussion on unpaid labor back in November.

New paper in ACE-ECO covering the work that was collected over the past several years each summer at the Emiquon Preserve here along the Illinois River.

This position is now closed

I gave a webinar for the Dept of Interior about my postdoc work, focused on the portfolio selection decision support tool I helped develop. The recording is available freely here.

Prior to coming to Forbes last summer, I worked with the Gulf of Mexico Avian Monitoring Network (gomamn.org). GoMAMN came together after the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill to better coordinate how we collect data about birds, so we’re better able to assess the impacts of restoration and management in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as the impact of one off events, such as oil spills and hurricanes.

I’m thrilled to be selected for the 2020 BioOne Ambassador Award, for my 2019 paper in Waterbirds, which presented the results of my three year wetland management experiment in Missouri examining the impacts of water level management during autumn migration on rails and waterfowl.

This is an update to a previous post. Folks who see twitter as something full of cat videos and the president’s latest thoughts often laugh when I tell them that twitter has been incredibly valuable to me, starting as a grad student, and now as a professional scientist.

I along with an amazing team are thrilled to announce that we’re receiving a grant from NOAA RESTORE for “Fire Effects in Gulf of Mexico Marshes - Historical Perspectives, Management, and Monitoring of Mottled Ducks and Black and Yellow Rails”

Some folks in my talk today asked if I could make my slides available.

Drymon, JM, Feldheim, K, Fournier, AMV, Seubert, E, Jefferson, A, Kroetz, A, Powers S Tiger sharks eat songbirds: Reply Ecology 10.1002/ecy.2870

For more details on the resources and citations from the 2019 symposium check out this link -> https://aurielfournier.github.io/women_in_waterfowl/

Fournier, AMV, Shave, A, Fischer, J, Siegrist, J, Ray, J, Chesky, T, MacIntosh, M, Fraser, K. Testing the island habitat-selection hypothesis in a long-distance migratory songbird Journal of Field Ornithology

Fournier, AMV, Mengel, DC, Gbur, E, Raedeke, A, Krementz, D.G. Evaluating tradeoffs in the response of Sora and waterfowl to the timing of early autumn wetland inundation Waterbirds 42:168-178

Fournier, A.M.V., Bond, A.L., Holford, A, Leighton, M. Unpaid work and access to science professions PLoS ONE 14(6): e0217032. 10.1371/journal.pone.0217032

Fournier, AMV, White, ER, Heard, SB. Site-selection bias can drive apparent population declines in long-term studies Preprint: peerj.com/preprints/27507/ Conservation Biology 10.1111/cobi.13371

THIS POSITION IS NOW CLOSED

Fournier, AMV, Eulinger, K, McDaniel, T, Calvert, G. Juvenile King Rail (Rallus elegans) in stomach of American Bullfrog (Lithobates catesbeianus) Herpetological Review 50:338

Drymon, JM, Feldheim, K, Fournier, AMV, Seubert, E, Jefferson, A, Kroetz, A, Powers S Tiger sharks eat songbirds: scavenging a windfall of nutrients from the sky Ecology 10.1002/ecy.2728

This is the data on the job search that resulted in my postdoc at Mississippi State University from 2017-2019.

I am very pleased to announce that I will be joining the wonderful staff at Forbes Biological Station as their Director in June.

On Friday I am leading a discussion for the COAST Women in Science Group about imposter syndrome. The feeling that you are an imposter, and everything else knows what they are doing, but you are a fraud. Its a common feeling among many folks, across career fields, and stages. It can be really debilitating and discouraging, and we’re hoping have an open discussion about it will help everyone realize that they are not alone.

For many reasons the past few months I’ve been feeling especially grateful for the wonderful people who are apart of my work and life because I am active on twitter. Folks who see twitter as something full of cat videos and the president’s latest thoughts often laugh at this, but science twitter is a powerful community, that has supported me in many small and huge ways over the past 5 years.

Back in February I was working on tweeting from R on behalf of the Wilson Ornithological Society, as I’m the person who tweets about new articles in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology.

Last week I had the great privilege to attend ROpenSci’s unconf. Having typically been in work situations where I was the only or primary R user, I was excited and nervous to attend my first R related event. I’ve been involved with the larger R community for several years, through The Carpentries, reviewing packages for ROpenSci, and through several package specific groups, but a chance to spend two days with my email closed, working on something new in R with many people who I’ve ‘known’ for years via twitter was fantastic. In addition ROpenSci worked diligently to ensure that unconf was a welcoming and inclusive place for everyone, from a clear and emphasized Code of Conduct, to ice breakers that helped start conversations among participants, to accommodating everyone’s dietary needs, and ensuring things like lactation rooms were available really made it clear that each participant was valued.

The unconf focuses on two days of community driven development, which can include new features of existing packages, lesson development, new packages and many other things. I spent my first day with the education group, talking about the opportunities and challenges of teaching R in a formal education setting. It was great to share experiences across disciplines [history, ecology, bioinformatics] and see that many of the struggles we as educators face are common across these disciplines. Our group’s goal is to form a community of educators in R who can share their materials more cohesively. More details on how the group outlined that sharing can be found here.

Day 2 I jumped in with the metadata group, who was working on the dataspice package. dataspice takes your raw data, and creates the spice on top of it, the metadata, which is so important for communicating with yourself in the future, as well as any others who may want to use your data. Creating metadata is often a hurdle to many data users/creators, and dataspice creates template metadata files based on a datafile input, and also has several shiny apps to help the user in populating those templates, which the package then turns into JSON, and if the userdesires a simple website about the dataset. Our hope is to make creating metadata more accessible to everyone!

Beyond being apart of the education and metadata groups, the conference was an amazing chance to meet many of my fellow R-Ladies, including some members of R-Ladies Remote. The ice breaker on the first day, where we grouped ourselves across a continum based on questions like ‘I know what my role in the R community is’ started some great conversations with folks, like myself, who are still not clear on what our role is. After unconf I feel more confident in my role and more confident in being involved and contributing to the parts of the community I belong to in the future.

ROpensci accepts applications to attend unconf each year in February and whether you are a R developer, or a post doc like me who teahes sometimes, and uses a lot of R packages, I encourage you to apply to attend, its a great way to learn, about R and the community as a whole.

Huge thanks to the ROpenSci team for their great effort in planning this amazing event and ensuring that everyone was welcome and able to participate to their fullest. You can see all the diverse and amazing things to come out of unconf18 here

New paper out today in Royal Society Open Science.

Excited to be interviewed by Rapid Ecology this week for their Ecologist Spotlight segment.

I’m part of the team behind the Wilson Ornithological Society twitter account. My main job is tweeting about the new articles in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology every time a new issue comes out (so 4 times a year). I’v been doing this since last summer, going into tweetdeck, and scheduling each tweet by hand, a process that takes several hours to do, since I want to tweet about each paper several times over the first week they are out, and make sure I hit a variety of time zones.

New paper out in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology !!

Continue to fight against injustice in all forms, stay informed, voice my opinion to those who represent me in government

Huge thanks to Timothée Poisot and the entire Poisot lab for hosting me in late November. It was wonderful to get to share my work with everyone in an seminar and then visiting with folks over several days. Montreal is a beautiful and fun city, and I loved finally getting to try Poutine!

As a long time fan of the Missouri Conservationist, the magazine produced by Missouri Department of Conservation, it is a real treat to see my work on the cover. I wrote a cover story article with Doreen Mengel and Lisa Webb detailing the rail work that has been going on during spring and autumn migration in Missouri the past 5 years.

Interested in learning more about my recent paper in the Journal of Avian Biology with Kiel Drake and Doug Tozer of Bird Studies Canada? Check out this post I wrote for the BOU Blog.

My latest paper is now available in Animal Migration. It details the autumn migration ecology, including the migratory timing and habitat use of Virginia and Yellow Rails in Missouri through five years of data I collected, compared with other sources of data since despite five years off data collection we still had a fairly small sample size.

Just returned from the first meeting of the American Ornithological Society (after the recent merger of AOU and COS), joined by the Society of Canadian Ornithologists to form a fantastic and fun meeting in East Lansing Michigan.

This past spring Arkansas State Parks came and recorded one of my Birds and Breakfast programs at Hobbs State Park. This program was one of the highlights of my PhD and I’m so tickled to have a video to remember all the kids and adults smiling faces while showing them their backyard birds.

Fournier, A.M.V., Drake K.L., Tozer D.C. In Press Using citizen science monitoring data in species distribution models to inform isotopic assignment of migratory connectivity in wetland birds Journal of Avian Biology doi:10.1111/jav.01273
Open Access Preprint: http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/01/144527
Open Access Data Dryad Digital Repository. http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.nb115

The most recent version of our recently accepted paper in the Journal of Avian Biology has been posted on the BioRvix PrePrint server if you would like to check it out.

This week I attended the 60th meeting of the International Association of Great Lakes Researchers. I was invited to give a talk as part of the science communication symposium, which was very fun. Slides are available on figshare.

Last week I had the pleasure of giving an invited talk to Bird Studies Canada reflecting on my ongoing collaboration with BSC and how I’ve used social media to communicate about our project. The slides are available on figshare.

Last year for the Ohio Ornithological Society and this year for The Biggest Week in American Birding I’m giving a keynote talk entited “Elusive Migration: The Migration Ecology of Rails”

If you have any interest in reading my entire dissertation it is now available online, open access.

Fournier, A.M.V., Krementz, D.G. 2017 Nocturnal Distance sampling All-Terrain Vehicle Surveys for Non-Breeding Rails The Wildlife Society Bulletin 41:151–156 doi:10.1002/wsb.745

I just returned from Fort Meyers, FL where I was attending the 98th Meeting of the Wilson Ornithological Society and presenting on one of my dissertation chapters.

I’m excited to announce I’ve been voted in as an Elected Councilor for a 3-year term with the Wilson Ornithological Society. So I’ll be serving as part of the council helping to guide WOS for the next 3 years.

I am thrilled to announce that I succesfully passed my PhD Defense last Friday, now I just need to address a few edits from my committee and my dissertation and PhD will be complete.

I am thrilled to announce that I have accepted a two year post doc at Mississippi State University, based in Biloxi, MS working as part of the Gulf of Mexico Avian Monitoring Network.

I’ve had this conversation with several people over the past few weeks, so like most things I talk to people frequently about I figured it was a good idea to write it up.

One of the challenges of working with rails is we know so little about them, and what we do know is often scattered in small data points here from the 1960s, and here from the 2000s. There is little data that has been collected in a deliberate way over a long period. The first place I looked was The Birds of North America, which provides detailed species accounts for each species. These graphs showed me some data, with literal question marks on it, that didn’t provide a lot of guidance as to when Virginia Rails were migrating (Conway 1995)

As a result of these fairly uninformative graphs I often end up digging into some literature to find data. Over the past two years I’ve tracked down almost all the issues of The Bluebird, journal of the Audubon Society of Missouri, and compiled all the spring and autumn migration data contained therein Data available here on figshare. These data are opportunistic at best (someone saw a rail, and decided to report it) but when looking at pre-eBird times (eBird being a very large online database of citizen science bird observations, which really took over after 2000) these kind of state by state resources can be vital.

I targeted Missouri because that is where my own field work takes place and I was seeking data to compare to my own. In five years and over 1000 hours of surveys I hadn’t seen very many Yellow or Virginia Rails (<100 in each case). This made quantifying their migration difficult especially because I am assuming some level of year to year variability in migration, which is common among birds.

So I sought out this other data, from the state Audubon Society. I also downloaded all August-November eBird.org observations for Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio (roughly the same latitude as Missouri and within the same adminsitrative flyway). These represent another type of opportunistic data, where members of the public go out birding, record what they see, and submit their observations. More data points were available here but eBird data can be biased because people tend to bird where they live, meaning effort is not evenly distributed across the landscape. So I sought out a third type of data, building strikes.

When I tell people rails hit buildings they are often surprised, but many many bird species have been recorded striking buildings. Many species of birds migrate at night and the lights on tall structures in large cities (and even in less urban situations) can disorient them and lead to collisions. In many large cities there are building strike monitoring programs where people walk the same route each morning and record what is found on the sidewalk (in many cases the dead birds are also collected and given to a museum, YAH MUSEUMS!). These data could be another interesting source since they are being collected each day in the same place, though this is only occurring in large cities. I obtained these data points from Loss et al (2014), Thanks Scott!

So I have these three kinds of data, and my own data, and I want to figure out what on earth they can tell me about the migration of two of the least studied birds in North America.

I thought about doing this a few different ways, first trying histograms, and line graphs, even scatter plots. None of these seemed to work. All the sample sizes were different and whatever the story was it was lost.

Then I tried box plots, with the idea this would help take out the highly variable y axis due to different sample sizes, and allow us to compare the duration and median date of migration.

This was ok. I only had one data point for building strikes of Yellow Rails, so I excluded it, and this figure is fine. But I wasn’t really happy with it, I was still wrestling back and forth with if I should be describing each data type on its own, or if they should all be lumped together, and I found this graph deceptive, it did a good job of making it clearer because the sample size was hidden, but that hidden element bugged me.

So I tried some other methods, again and again.

Finally I settled on this one.

This graph does a few things I really like. It separates out the Birds of North America data, which isn’t really data so much as my visualization of the information on the graph in the Birds of North American Accounts. It also lumps the data in a way I am comfortable with. All the data I gathered from other sources, Audubon Society of Missouri, eBird and the building strike data, are lumped into ‘Opportunistic Observations’ which I think is the most conservative way of looking at them. My data, which were collected through nightly regular surveys are separated for two main reasons 1) they are my data and I wanted to compare my data to other data, 2) they were collected under one standardized protocol, unlike the other data types.

I think this data does a better job of showing the story. Yellow Rail migration, in my study and in the opportunistic data is occurring in two strong peaks which are near each other. Why they aren’t the same could be related to a variety of biases and assumptions in the data set. These also overlap well with the Birds of North America account range though they start earlier, which could be a big deal.

Virginia Rail migration is clearly a different beast. Opportunistic observations have two peaks, one of which strongly overlaps with my data, and migration is starting earlier and continuing much later than it does in the Birds of North America Account.

One thing I don’t like about this figure is I don’t have a good way of showing the yearly variation in the data, which is probably asking too much of what is still a pretty limited data set, but a ornithologist can dream!

I’m still working on this manuscript, and still trying to decide if this is the best way to visualize this kind of data. If you have ideas I’d love to hear them, aurielfournier@gmail.com or @RallidaeRule.

Citations

Conway, Courtney J. (1995). Virginia Rail (Rallus limicola), The Birds of North America (P. G. Rodewald, Ed.). Ithaca: Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Retrieved from the Birds of North America: https://birdsna.org/Species-Account/bna/species/virrai DOI: 10.2173/bna.173

Fournier, Auriel (2016): The Bluebird Rail Data. figshare. https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.2760913.v2 Retrieved: 21 50, Dec 05, 2016 (GMT)

Loss, S. R. S. S., T. Will, P. P. Marra, S. R. S. S. Loss, and P. P. Marra. 2014. Bird–building collisions in the United States: Estimates of annual mortality and species vulnerability. Condor 116:8–23. http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1650/CONDOR-13-090.1%5Cnhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1650/CONDOR-13-090.1.

Sullivan, B. L., C. L. Wood, M. J. Iliff, R. E. Bonney, D. Fink, and S. Kelling. 2009. eBird: A Citizen-based Bird Observation Network in the Biological Sciences. Biological Conservation 142:2282–2292.

2016 numbers followed by (all time project total)

Presented one of my dissertation chapters at the North American Ornithological Conference this past week. Using species distribution models from marshbird monitoring data to inform bayesian assignment of migratory rails during autumn migration.

Rebecca Heiseman, Beth Ross, Desiree Narango, Jordan Rutter and myself did a short workshop at the North American Ornithological Conference Tuesday, highlighting the many ways twitter can be used by scientists.

Building off the success of the workshop Matt Boone and I taught at AOU in 2015 I taught a full day R workshop on programming, functions, data management and how to build an R package at the North American Ornithological Conference this year. Had 60+ participants and everyone learned a ton. Hoping to tweak it again, improve it some more and teach it again at AOU in 2017.

Just returned from a great meeting in Corpus Christi, Texas and the annual meeting of the Society of Wetland Scientists. I’ve never been to SWS before and it was a wonderful and informative meeting and great chance to break out of my often very bird focused bubble and think about wetlands in some new ways.

There are pictures of me geeking out about birds since I was quite small. Those who knew me even in passing as a kid are unsurprised where I ended up. I have been incredibly fortunate along the way to be guided mentored and at time shoved by some very key people in my life.

Sometime around American Thanksgiving I was asked on Twitter to recommend a few historic women in ornithology for someone’s kid to research for a school paper. I sat there, stared at my screen and then hung my head.

Last fall I tweeted from @RealScientists and @BioTweeps as part of the outreach for my fall field work (#MORails). I choose to do this during my field work since live tweeting rail captures is WAY more exciting then live tweeting running R code or writing which is what I do the other 9 months of the year.

My latest post as the science/math editor for Science Borealis is up. Talking about the role of hunting and statistics in wetland conservation, especially as it relates to migratory birds.

I’m already into my second week as the Teaching Assistant for the Undergrad/Graduate Biometry course here at UA. I am really excited to be teaching again this semester (I always forget how much I enjoy it) and doubly so since I get to teach people about R. I’m working on moving all the course materials over from systat to R, since this is the first time its being taught in R. If you are curious what we cover check out the repo.

If you are a regular reader the topic of my most recent paper won’t be too surprising. Dr. Alex Bond and I have written an editorial in The Wildlife Society Bulletin entitled Volunteer Field Technicians Are Bad for Wildlife Ecology.

I was interviewed for the podcast BreakingBio about rails, wetlands, atvs and diversity in STEM. Check it out here

Here are the best photos and tweets of the 2015 #MORails season. https://storify.com/amv_fournier/morails-2015

The fall migration part of my project was highlighted recently in the University of Arkansas Research Blog Field Notes. Check it out here

72 nights
10 sites
30 treatment wetlands
10,700 miles driven in the truck
~1200 miles driven on ATV
169 hours of surveying
1063 Sora (don’t do the math for miles/dollar per Sora, just don’t)
7 Virginia rails
12 Yellow rails
62 rails captured (3 Virginia, 5 Yellow, 54 Sora)
62 sets of feathers gathered for migratory connectivity research (these will be combined with feathers from previous years, the 60 from Canada this summer and hunter feathers from all over the central US!!!)
120 hours of nighttime go pro video footage (videos will be posted once I get time to process them)
5 fouled spark plugs
3 carburetors cleaned
2 spotlights held together with electrical tape and hope
1 new air filter
5 oil changes on ATVs
1 flat tire (ON THE FIRST DAY)
5 seasons of Breaking Bad watched
+/- 1000 cups of tea and coffee consumed

0 times running out of gas on the ATVS
0 times losing wallets
0 times putting ATVs into way to deep water
0 King Rails (sadly)
0 Black Rails (still not sure they exist….)

many hours sprawled out in random parking lots trying to figure out what was wrong with the atvs
many hours of laughing and brownies and cooking together

In response to a request from a friend who is just starting her PhD, here is what I wish I could tell my first year PhD Student self, and what advice I can give to other graduate student Women in STEM. This was written during the first week of my field season, so the thoughts are short, but I am happy to discuss them more if folks have questions or comments.

My work in Saskatchewan this summer was highlighted in the University of Arkansas Research Blog Field Notes recently.

Monday August 10th begins my fourth field season. Just saying that makes me pause, I’m a fourth year PhD Student, a PhD Candidate, man time has flown.

Matt Boone and I have compiled our notes and resources from the workshop we taught at the 2015 meeting of the American Ornithologists Union/Cooper Ornithological Society. If you are interested check out the repo here

I gave a presentation at the American Ornithologists Union/Cooper Ornithological Society meeting in Norman, OK this past week highlighting some work that I started in my undergraduate and which I hope to soon have accepted for publication.

I’m giving a presentation today at the Association of Field Ornithology / Society of Canadian Ornithologists / Wilson Ornithological Society Joint Meeting in Wolfville, Nova Scotia today.

I originally wrote this in 2015 when I was a grad student hiring field techs. This advice still holds, and I hope folks applying for graduate positions will follow it as well.

This post was originally peeked by a thread on reddit about lab safety horror stories, and is in fact horrifying. My experience lies in a different realm, field work, where safety is often also a big issue, though the guidelines around it are often missing, or totally ignored. I chatted very briefly with a few folks about this on twitter a week or so ago and my initial wanting to write this post was dampened by the realization that like the reddit post, this may spark a string of ‘oh you did that dangerous thing, mine was so much more dangerous’ and further fuel the masochistic dangerous mindset that often hangs over fieldwork and is very alienating to many, and dangerous for everyone.

In March I coordinated a Software Carpentry workshop here at the University of Arkansas. We did a two-day workshop on R, the Unix Shell and Git and it was very well received. A few people have asked me to write up my thoughts on planning the workshop, the workshop itself, etc, so here it goes.

I originally wanted to call this ‘why I love birds’ but I realized that my urge to write this comes not really from my love of all things with feathers, but from my passion for what I do, and the sadness I sometimes feel when others try to tell me my passion is bad, or don’t have passion of their own towards their own science.

FYI This post lead to the publication of a paper in 2015 with Alex Bond. Fournier, A.M.V., Bond, A.L. Volunteer field staff are bad for wildlife ecology The Wildlife Society Bulletin 39: 819-821 doi:10.1002/wsb.603 pdf link

At The Wildlife Society National Conference this year in Pittsburgh I presented a poster summarizing our results from the first year of our crossover experiment. If you would like to check it out, it’s on figshare.

Every year of fieldwork I do seems like an additional argument for Murphy’s Law and Long-Term Research. No two years are alike, and this year was the year of thunderstorms and rain. 2012 was a drought and 2013 was drought-like (it rained earlier in the year, but not much during the season). Despite the weather’s best efforts we were able to get in all the surveys we needed to complete and picked up on some weird patterns along the way. This year had no clear peak in migration (unlike the previous two field seasons) though we saw essentially the same number of birds, they just came through at a more steady rate throughout the year.

Somehow the 2014 field season is already half over, and once again the weather and the birds are throwing a totally different suite of challenges our way.

Each season of my project is broken down into four rounds of surveys. We visit each region of the state four times and we’ve just finished up our first set of visits to each region.

Since I’m now on the other side of comps I’ve had a few people ask me for suggestions on how to prepare for their own. Here’s a few thoughts.

My comps are coming up fast (8 days!!) and the end of the semester is finally past, FINALLY. The past two months have been a bit of a wake up call about how I need to take care of myself as well as my work. In the spirit of taking care of myself, I’m carving out a few minutes to breathe and share a bit more of my comps process.

Can you see the tiny clear antennae sticking out from between his feathers, that is the geolocator

Marla showing a cardinal to some kids

Staying focused is hard, being productive perhaps even more challenging. In grad school the challenge of focus is especially true because there are SO many things pulling for your attention. Your research, your classes, any teaching you do, writing grants, writing papers, presenting at conferences, and all the other tasks. It makes it easy to be very busy without actually doing anything.

Science is all about discovering new things, whether its information new to humanity as a whole or just to yourself. The moment of discovery is what drives many of us in science. As I’m studying for my comprehensive exams I am having a lot of these moments. Things are clicking together. I am forming connections between papers and ideas which had never occurred to me before. Constant discovery is what makes all my studying so addictive, even when it takes me two hours to get through a paper because I’m going to Google every other paragraph for another explanation.

A few weeks back I had a series of conversations with some other scientists who decided to tell me different variations of ‘birds aren’t important’ ‘people who work on birds lack creativity’ ‘you aren’t as good of a scientists because you work on a charismatic animal’.

I love science because the idea a bird can FLY from continent to continent twice a year and come back to the same place, amazes me. I love things with wings, with feathers, with elaborate songs and displays. I love birds, and I have since I was young, (granted I still am, so lets just say, younger). I love how many different ways there are to move from place to place throughout the year. So many different strategies and ideas. I love the fact that migration has captured the human imagination for millenia and connects people across languages and cultures.

Field Season 2013 By The Numbers

So now that I’ve managed to get into graduate school and am having a pretty good time thus far I’ve been getting lots of questions on what method I used to go about getting the position I did. This is a complex question, there is a lot that you need to do and think about and just about as many ideas on how to go about it. But since I keep getting asked here is my take, what I did, and what I’ve been told can help you along the way. Keep in mind, I’m still in my first year, so while I was successful in getting in only time will tell if I end up successful all the way around.