Symposium number: 44

Title: CLIMATE CHANGE AND AVIAN LIFE HISTORIES

Principal organizer: Christiaan Both
Animal Ecology Group, Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Studies, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
email: c.both@rug.nl

First keynote speaker: Christiaan Both
Animal Ecology Group, Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Studies, University of Groningen. The Netherlands
Title of first keynote paper: Climate change and adaptation of annual cycles of migratory birds

Second keynote speaker: Peter P. Marra and Colin E. Studds
Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, National Zoological Park, USA
Title of second keynote paper: The role of climate in driving within-season performance and carry-over effects from the non-breeding season for a long-distance migratory bird

Contributed talks

Symposium description: Birds are generally flexible in their life histories and are well able to cope with between year variation in climatic variables. The ongoing directional change in climate, however, forces birds outside the range they have been adapted to in the past, and either they seek new routes to adapt to this new environmental challenges or they disappear from the scene. Especially birds with complex annual cycles such as long-distance migrants are vulnerable to this large scale climatic change, because they rely on a whole series of environments at different times during their annual cycle, and these may change at different rates. Birds may change their life-histories from migrant to resident, or change wintering or breeding sites and these changes can either be phenotypic changes or of genetic origin i.e. evolutionary change. In this symposium we explore these different options of birds to change their life histories to meet the challenges of climate change, with the emphasis on migratory birds.

back to list of symposia

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