Dr. Marie Auger-Méthé is the recipient of one of six UBC Killam Accelerator Research Fellowships which are provided annually from the Killam endowment established through a bequest from the late Dorothy J. Killam. The Killam Accelerator Research Fellowships (KARF) are designed to empower early‑career scholars who have already demonstrated notable impact in their fields and are poised to advance to the next stage of their research careers, providing research funding and valuable time to devote to their work.
Dr. Auger-Méthé is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of British Columbia, jointly appointed with the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries (IOF). She also holds a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Statistical Ecology and is a leading figure in the investigation of animal movement. Dr. Auger-Méthé is internationally known for developing data analysis tools used by research ecologists to better understand animal behaviour and by government agencies to guide concrete management decisions, and she has collaborated with Indigenous hunters to meaningfully integrate Indigenous knowledge into statistical analysis. Her research output includes papers in ecological and statistics journals, and accompanying R packages. Her publication record—over 60 peer-reviewed papers as an associate professor—is exceptional and more typical of a full professor in the discipline.
Dr. Auger-Méthé has developed state space and hierarchical models to better capture the complexity of animal movement, yet still maintain interpretability. Her highly cited first-authored 2021 Ecological Monographs paper showcases her expertise in applications of state-space modelling to ecological time series and her ability to communicate complex technical information to ecologists. Her contributions to Hidden Markov Models include accounting for the fine-scale dependence and multiscale structure associated with high-frequency data, providing accurate classification with sparse labels, speeding up fitting algorithms, and automatically selecting the number of hidden states. In a series of papers, she has incorporated Indigenous knowledge into statistical analyses to understand seal behaviour and habitat use. She has also used citizen science from whale-watching, accounting for the spatially-biased search effort present in such opportunistic datasets.
This fellowship will allow Dr. Auger- Méthé to develop data-based methods and resources to guide decisions to identify critical habitat. The work will build on her research in hierarchical models and in combining different forms of data, including citizen science data and Indigenous Knowledge. Through this work, she will create easy-to-use tools that identify Critical Habitats quickly and accurately and which will facilitate the protection of such habitats via governmental policies (e.g., recovery strategies and marine protected areas). She will also create an open-access repository of Critical Habitat information that can be used by NGOs, First Nations, and other groups when advocating for the protection of imperilled species. Such work is urgently needed to address biodiversity loss and generate systematic ways of meeting Canada’s conservation goals. To demonstrate the usefulness of these tools, she will apply them to marine mammals and seabirds data in areas with increasing shipping and energy developments.
Congratulations, Dr. Auger-Méthé!