From individuals to flyways: The future of marking birds for conservation

Abstract

The broad agenda for bird and biodiversity conservation, together with wider environmental issues such as global environmental change and disease control, will continue to set the context and priorities for research based on marked birds. We outline the ways in which the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) Ringing Scheme will address these issues and how it will contribute to all six science themes of the BTO Strategy. New technologies for tracking birds will continue to increase in importance, facilitating novel study designs that require fewer birds to be marked and will lead to rapid increases in knowledge complementing more traditional bird ringing. Continental and flyway mechanisms for rapid collation, sharing and analysis of data will become the norm. The power of analysis and modelling techniques will continue to grow, facilitating integrated analyses of multiple data sets. The scientific progress achieved through large-scale bird ringing over the last 100 years has been critically dependent on thousands of highly skilled and dedicated volunteers, whose efforts will be equally important in the future. Maintaining their enthusiasm and support at a time of unprecedented changes in technology and study designs will be a key challenge for bird-marking schemes during the first half of the 21st century. © 2009 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.