Symposium number: 17

Title: FROM TREND ANALYSIS TO POPULATION ALERT

Principal organizer: Mark Rehfisch
British Trust for Ornithology, The Nunnery, Thetford, IP24 2PU, United Kingdom
email: Mark.Rehfisch@bto.org

Second organizer: Ruud Foppen
SOVON Dutch Centre for Field Ornithology, Rijksstraatweg 178, 6573 DG Beek Ubbergen, The Netherlands

First keynote speaker: Les Underhill
Avian Demography Unit, University of Cape Town, Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7700, South Africa
Title of first keynote paper: Developments in trend analysis for waterbirds

Second keynote speaker: Graham Austin
British Trust for Ornithology, The Nunnery, Thetford, IP24 2PU, United Kingdom
Title of second keynote paper: Waterbird alerts in Great Britain

Contributed talks

Symposium description: The symposium will review recent developments in population trend analysis and describe the costs and benefits of different approaches to conservation monitoring. Prof. Les Underhill will describe major new approaches being applied to this field, some of which involve Bayesian mathematics and the application of econometric techniques. For example, econometricians have developed the "Market Model" as a means for analysing relationships between the index for a stock market as a whole and the individual stocks that comprise the index. These methods decompose the "risk" of a share in the "market" and "unique" risk. Analogous analyses can be carried out for waterbirds, measuring the extent to which fluctuations at a site relate to factors unique to the site rather than to changes in the overall index. These "unique" factors can be used to set "alerts" for a site. Dr Graham Austin will explain how one approach to trend generation, Generalized Additive Models, has formed the basis of an "alerting" mechanism that is being used to inform governmental conservation policy in the UK.

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