Symposium number: 16

Title: DEMOGRAPHIC MECHANISMS IN POPULATION CHANGE AT LARGE SPATIAL SCALES

Principal organizer: Fernando Spina
Istituto Nazionale Fauna Selvatica, Via Ca' Fornacetta, I-40064 Ozzano Emilia (BO), Italy
email: fernando.spina@infs.it

Second organizer: Stephen Baillie
British Trust for Ornithology, The Nunnery, Thetford, Norfolk, IP24 2PU, United Kingdom

First keynote speaker: James D. Nichols
U.S. Geological Survey, Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, Laurel, MD 20708, USA
Title of first keynote paper: Adaptive harvest management of North American waterfowl populations – recent successes and future prospects

Second keynote speaker: Stephen Baillie
British Trust for Ornithology, The Nunnery, Thetford, Norfolk, IP24 2PU, United Kingdom
Title of second keynote: Studying population processes at different spatial scales using standardized mist-netting

Contributed talks

Symposium description: There is much interest in addressing bird conservation issues at large spatial scales; and it is increasingly recognized that problems involving the rapid decline of widespread species can only be handled at governmental or supra-governmental (e.g. EU) levels. Understanding demographic mechanisms at these scales is the key to developing effective conservation policies. Not only for these reasons, a symposium on this subject is timely also because of the coincidence of improved technology in data gathering, analytical methods and policy requirements. Advances in the management of ringing data have facilitated the analysis of a number of large-scale data sets, demonstrating the value of such analyses for identifying demographic mechanisms. Comprehensive ringing has developed rapidly on both sides of the Atlantic since the early 1990s, producing systematic survival and productivity data for terrestrial breeding birds on both continents. Recent analytical developments, including use of the Kalman filter and Baysian approaches (MCMC), now offer powerful analytical techniques that can be applied to such data. Adaptive management approaches to systems such as the harvest management for waterfowl in North America have been operating for sufficient time to allow evaluation of their usefulness for providing conservation management advice in the presence of uncertainty. The coming-together of such datasets and analytical approaches should allow ornithologists to make rapid advances in understanding demographic processes at large spatial scales and, accordingly, to provide more effective conservation advice.

back to list of symposia

Home | Scientific Programme | Officers | Venue | Accommodation | Tours | Past Congresses