Symposia

Understanding avian diets: emerging techniques and new applications

Kirsty E.B. Gurney, Kevin J. Kardynal

Invited speakers will present new findings and describe emerging techniques related to dietary study in birds, with the goals of generating ideas for future directions, improving inference, and making knowledge more accessible to a broad range of ornithologists.

Dietary analysis is an important component of avian research, with knowledge on consumed resources providing key information for understanding species’ reproductive and developmental needs, as well as population-level processes and threats related to changes in food availability and quality. Current methods of dietary research, including stable isotope analyses and DNA-based techniques, represent improvements over previous approaches but are not without limitations. Trade-offs between taxonomic and temporal resolution are often necessary, such that challenges in quantifying resource needs remain. Given the increasing scale and pace of environmental change, however, there is a need to identify how birds are affected by such change and to develop effective conservation strategies to protect their food resources. Projects describing emerging techniques and presenting new findings on avian diet will thus make important contributions to conservation efforts, particularly projects focused on validations and combining techniques to overcome limitations and improve inference. We will assemble speakers who (i) will present research that uses current and emerging approaches to study avian diet, and (ii) will discuss these methods, key assumptions, limitations, and areas for future research. Presenters will provide diverse perspectives on diet analysis to create a thought-provoking, inclusive, and focused symposium that improves our knowledge of avian trophic ecology.

Data Integration: Moving Beyond Single Methodology Migration Research

Miguel (Mikko) Jimenez, Kyle Horton, Kristen Ruegg

This series of talks will spotlight efforts to integrate different data types to advance our understanding of the full annual cycles of migratory species.

The past few decades have been marked by rapid advancements in the technology and methodologies available to study bird migration. This has led to vast expansions in the nature of the questions we can ask as well as the insights we can infer, creating a much more comprehensive understanding of the full annual cycles of migratory birds. However, this expansion has also made it clear that there are trade-offs related to every approach to studying migration. That is, each technique offers information about a specific aspect of bird migration, but may be limited spatially, temporally, or in its ability to provide information at the species or population level. Thus, our ability to combine datasets that offer complementary information represents a new frontier of migration research. Further, data integration can help facilitate stronger relationships between research groups, fostering a network of migration scientists. Our symposium seeks to highlight recent work that has capitalized on this opportunity, illuminating the unique research questions that can be asked through data integration and exploring the collaborative culture that it can cultivate.

Focus on females: insights from studies on female song, behavior, and physiology

Joanna Wu

In our symposium, a group of mostly female and early career scientists will present research on female song, behavior, and physiology that has been historically misunderstood or overlooked and encourage attendees to think about the value of studying all aspects of female biology.

Full Description: As a field, ornithology has historically misunderstood or overlooked female organisms, or assumed they are “similar enough” to males. The danger of those assumptions is if studies based on half the population (i.e., males) are projected onto traits for females, results and decisions based on those findings can be misleading when female birds differ from males in key aspects of their biology. Migration biology, for example, differs among sexes, yet tracking is biased towards males and leaves knowledge gaps about females. Another problem arises when scientists assume certain behaviors are only performed by males. For example, “song” was defined in early ornithology as “vocalizations produced by males in the breeding season.” As such, female vocalizations have largely been ignored or discounted as calls that do not serve the same function as male song. Numerous recent studies point out that female song is omitted from song theory despite it being present in a majority of species with sex-specific song information. Likewise, female competition and reproductive physiology are less studied than in males. Our symposium will present research on female song, reproductive behaviors, competition, and physiology. We will close out with a panel discussion on knowledge gaps that remain about female birds and potential synergies in this field.

The Optimisymposium: Celebrating success in avian conservation

W. Andrew Cox, Sarah Kendrick

This symposium is a celebration of habitat, population, and species-wide avian conservation successes.

The magnitude of the threats faced by birds at local and global scales is daunting and can leave conservation professionals and the general public feeling bereft of hope. Nevertheless, professionals need some semblance of positivity and reminders of conservation successes to operate effectively, and support from the public for avian conservation is reliant in part on positive messaging. The proposed symposium will highlight habitat, population, and species-wide conservation successes for birds across the Americas to reinforce that conservation can work in the Anthropocene. Presentations will highlight conservation wins and demonstrate the effective intersection of research, stakeholder engagement, and management.

This symposium organized by the American Ornithological Society’s (AOS’s) Conservation Committee.

Effects of supplemental feeding on birds and the people who feed them

David N. Bonter, Tina Phillips

The practice of bird feeding has diverse implications for birds, people, and the broader environment; our interdisciplinary session will highlight ongoing work and frame a research agenda for future explorations of this integrated socio-ecological system.

With more than 50 million people feeding wild birds each year in the United States alone, people are engaging in a large-scale supplemental feeding experiment that affects wild bird populations, both positively and negatively. Given peoples’ monetary and emotional investments in feeding birds, the activity also has implications for humans. This symposium will provide novel insights into the coupled socio-ecological system wherein people and birds interact via bird feeders. These interactions have diverse implications for birds related to survival, range changes, exposure to predators and disease, and a suite of other ecological impacts. Meanwhile, attracting birds to supplemental feeding stations similarly has implications for people through changes in human emotions, connection with nature, sense of well-being, and management actions. The symposium will also examine bird feeding through the lens of participatory science, investigating what steps could be taken to make a participatory science program more inclusive. With the practice of supplemental feeding continuing to grow and expand geographically, understanding the dynamics of this integrated socio-ecological system is important for birds, individual people, and policy. This interdisciplinary symposium will bring together ornithologists, disease ecologists, and social scientists to advance understanding of the large-scale, unplanned experiment of the supplemental feeding of wild birds and the people who feed them.

Bioacoustics: enabling insights into avian ecology in an age of rapid change

Kate McGinn, Connor Wood

This session will explore how bioacoustics can provide novel insights into avian behaviors, populations, and communities as environments are changing rapidly, highlighting the need for research that spans multiple levels of biological organization.

Loss of habitat, climate change, and other human-related environmental changes have driven global declines in bird populations – a warning sign that the health and stability of ecosystems are in jeopardy. Accessible and scalable methods for collecting biological data are necessary to understand birds as their world changes rapidly. Birds communicate using acoustic signals, enabling individuals to elicit food resources, locate conspecifics, signify danger, or coordinate group behaviors. Identifying where, when, and why these acoustic events occur can provide unique opportunities to understand habitat associations, demography, behavior, and the life history of many species across spatial and biological scales. Bioacoustics, the analysis of environmental sounds, has become increasingly common in avian research. Novel methods are rapidly emerging to organize acoustic information, scan massive datasets, and scale investigations to answer broad-scale questions without sacrificing ecological detail. This symposium will feature work that seeks to understand avian individuals, populations, and communities in an era of rapid change and panel discussions about how bioacoustics can shape the future of avian research and inform our perspective of the life of birds.

Population-level impacts of renewable energy infrastructure on birds

Casey Setash, Tara Conkling

This symposium will cover the realized and potential population-level effects of renewable energy infrastructure on birds of conservation concern, in addition to new tools being used to study these effects.

Renewable energy (primarily wind and solar) facilities are being developed rapidly across the globe to meet ambitious greenhouse gas emission reduction goals. The direct and indirect impacts of energy infrastructure on birds have long been the focus of study, but the synthesis of more accessible, standardized datasets and new methodological tools are now allowing for more temporally and spatially broad-scale evaluations of impacts. This symposium will highlight recent research focused on avian impacts of renewable energy infrastructure at the most common scale of wildlife conservation and management: the population level. Topics will cover a diverse range of taxa, life-history strategies, and tools used to manage populations with respect to energy infrastructure expansion in the face of interacting anthropogenic impacts (e.g., climate change, other development, and agriculture). Speakers will highlight the most at-risk bird populations, how bird populations respond to infrastructure, and forecast the future of species of conservation concern under various scenarios.

The consequences of reproductive timing on individual performance in a changing world

Alex O. Sutton

This symposium will highlight the causes and consequences of timing of breeding and how the benefits of breeding at specific times are altered by rapidly changing environmental conditions.

This symposium brings together a diverse range of ornithologists from a variety of career stages investigating the causes and consequences of when individuals breed, highlighting the effects of climate change on timing of breeding and what this means for individuals and populations. Why birds choose to breed when they do has long fascinated ornithologists. The decision of when to breed is driven by a complex suite of both internal (e.g., individual physiology) and external (e.g., food availability, environmental conditions) factors, each of which either facilitate or limit the ability of an individual to breed. Timing of breeding has been shown to be a key driver of variation in reproductive performance and can underlie temporal patterns of reproductive output, including seasonal declines in brood size or fledging rate. Climate change is rapidly altering environmental conditions breeding individuals are exposed to and can often dramatically alter the benefits of timing of breeding, typically by influencing the availability of resources, timing of resource pulses, and increasing variability in weather conditions. In the context of ongoing climate change, it is more important than ever to understand how changing phenology of breeding influences individual fitness and the consequences of these changes for populations and communities. 

Yellowstone Birds: Ecology, Conservation and Management

Douglas W. Smith, Diana F. Tomback, Walter Wehtje

This symposium presents recent advances in avian research and key management issues for birds inhabiting or using Yellowstone National Park and represents a previously neglected park fauna.

This symposium will present park projects on diverse avian taxa and feature research expertise from agency, university, and non-profit sectors. Yellowstone National Park (YNP) is home to high-profile large mammal studies, but its bird program, established in the mid-1980s, has been limited and poorly supported until recent years. Paradoxically, many park management issues relate to avian biodiversity and population persistence, especially climate change and regional human population growth. Despite the park’s size, most of its bird populations encompass different management policies and threats across boundaries and agencies. YNP’s birds and current issues were highlighted in the 2023 book “Yellowstone’s Birds: Diversity and Abundance in the World’s First National Park.” Presentations will include the following examples: YNP is one of the last strongholds for Trumpeter Swans in North America but the population, monitored for 90 years, nearly blinked out. YNP was a release site for Peregrine Falcons, contributing to their region-wide recovery. Reduced foraging success in Golden Eagles, which were censused for the first time in 2012, has been linked to a decline in ungulate winter die-off and the resurgence of  carnivores. The most southern and isolated population of Common Loons in North America is threatened by human disturbance and lake trout gill nets. Clark’s Nutcrackers are primary dispersers of whitebark pine, a federally threatened species, but the stability of nutcracker populations in YNP is unknown. In sum, the symposium will explore the challenge of translating research into management practice in YNP through a series of case studies.

Fire and pyrodiversity as drivers of bird habitat in fire-prone systems

Frank Fogarty, Gavin Jones, Kate McGinn

This symposium will highlight work from across a diverse range of biomes to advance our understanding of the effects of fire on avian ecology by examining how pyrodiversity, the variation within individual fires and across fire regimes, influences bird habitat.

Wildfire is one of the most acute drivers of land cover change, and fires are increasing in intensity, area burned, and geographic range. While fires degrade habitat for some bird species, they also create habitat for species adapted to burned, early successional, or otherwise disturbed landscapes. These post-burn landscapes are dynamic, often changing rapidly in the years and decades following fires. Ecologists are increasingly recognizing the effects of pyrodiversity in shaping post-fire landscapes as bird habitats. Pyrodiversity relates to the variation within individual fires and across fire regimes, including differences in return interval, severity, and spatial and temporal extents. A series of recent publications has  highlighted both the challenges of effectively quantifying pyrodiversity in studies of avian ecology and the opportunities to use this concept to better understand how fire interacts with biodiversity. In this symposium, we will highlight cutting edge work that examines bird habitat through the lens of pyrodiversity. Talks will cover a wide range of biomes, and include speakers from Latin America and landscapes where fire has received less attention in the ornithological literature. 

Building the Cross-boundary Grassland Conservation Delivery Supply Chain

James Giocomo

This symposium will explore how conservation partners are working together across multiple scales to get the right conservation, in the right place, at the right time across the Great Plains biome by supporting a science-based Conservation Delivery Supply Chain.

Meeting today’s grassland conservation challenges across North America will require a significant ramping-up of conservation delivery capacity. Conservation delivery in the Central Grasslands largely involves voluntary management actions on private lands and the implementation and execution of science-based conservation practices and initiatives aimed at preserving and enhancing natural resources. Conservation delivery is impacted by many systems and decisions made at multiple scales and by multiple organizations, and can be treated as a supply chain. By applying the supply chain concept to conservation delivery, the goal is to create a well-coordinated, collaborative, and adaptive system that maximizes the impact of conservation efforts on private lands in the central grasslands. We used the restoration of declining bird populations as a basis to build an understanding of the land management effort (acres) needed to meet bird population objectives. This understanding creates opportunities to plan for the kinds of programs (dollars) and the staffing (people) needed to ramp-up conservation delivery capacity. We’ll show examples of how using a birds-acres-dollars-people framework can help implement strategies at various scales that help to build and strengthen the cross-boundary conservation delivery supply chain that could serve as an example to address biome-wide challenges in other parts of the hemisphere.

Managing Threats and Balancing Conservation for Avian Biodiversity in the Sagebrush Ecosystem

Cameron Aldridge, Sara Oyler-McCance, Shawna Zimmerman

This symposium will highlight the current challenges and threats that avifauna face within the threatened sagebrush ecosystem, assessing population demography, adaptive divergence, behavioral responses, and climate change, all aiding in conservation and management.

The sagebrush ecosystem covers much of western North America and supports a diverse assemblage of avian species. Ongoing and historical anthropogenic modifications have left the sagebrush ecosystem fragmented and reduced to less than half the former extent. Climate change has further degraded the ecosystem through aridification and more frequent and intense fires, especially as exotic annual grass invasion increases. The human footprint in the sagebrush ecosystem remains significant with agriculture, ranching, and energy development all providing substantial disturbance. Such stressors require land managers to balance land-use practices with conservation. Additionally, avian sagebrush species have diverse needs and management actions that benefit one species may harm another, and strategies to understand the costs and benefits of these actions for species of concern, as well as non-target species, is becoming incredibly important. In this symposium we profile research on many of these issues, ranging from population demography, adaptive divergence, behavioral responses to threats, and the consequence of climate change. We also highlight a diversity of research to evaluate and aid in conservation and management.

Mountain birds in the Anthropocene

Benjamin Freeman

In this symposium, we will highlight recent advances in studying montane birds and how they are responding to anthropogenic drivers of change.

Mountains are home to exceptionally diverse avifauna that are ideal systems for studying community ecology, adaptation, and speciation. The goal of this symposium is twofold. First, to bring together researchers from around the globe studying montane birds from different angles, in order to share what we know about montane bird ecology, evolution, and conservation. Second, to bring together expertise to identify crucial knowledge gaps and foster collaborative research networks. In keeping with the meeting theme, a “Summit on Birds that live close to Summits” at a conference location surrounded by summits, the goal is to bring together a diverse set of scientists working across the globe, with a particular emphasis on early career researchers (e.g. the majority of speakers will be graduate students, postdocs, or early career faculty).

The ecology, evolution and conservation of North America’s Rosy-Finches

Erika Zavaleta, Reza Goljani Amirkhiz, Ben Vernasco

This session will highlight current research on unique alpine songbirds, North America’s diverse Rosy-Finches, to advance their conservation under accelerating climate change.

North America’s Rosy-Finches (Leucosticte sp.) are fascinating and beloved, but little-studied until recently. Rosy-Finches breed at the highest available elevations across much of western US and Canada, are likely exposed and vulnerable to climate change. Lack of knowledge about their ecology, evolution, and behavior has resulted in widespread calls for their conservation and inclusion on the IUCN Red List (Black Rosy-Finch) and other high-priority avian conservation lists. Session talks span applied climate change, autoecology, behavior, and evolutionary perspectives, which we will integrate to provide stronger understanding of priority knowledge gaps and takeaways for stewardship of North American Rosy-Finches. We aim to bring together representatives of every group studying North American Rosy-Finches to consolidate the state of knowledge, inform conservation and management, and shape future research. We have organized talks into three sections: behavior, evolution and genomics; breeding ecology; and non-breeding (winter) ecology. We chose this structure to facilitate comparison across levels of organization (individuals to populations) and across Rosy-Finch taxa, which diverged relatively recently but have a wide range of life histories. We also sought to avoid compartmentalizing talks as applied or basic, since all new knowledge will contribute to both fundamental understanding and decision-making that affects these birds and their habitats.

Full life cycle conservation of the western Yellow-billed Cuckoo

Jenna Stanek, Jenny Davis

This symposium will  discuss varying occupancy and habitat use, expanding research techniques, and the integration of biological and social science to identify potential causes of decline throughout the full annual life cycle of a neotropical migrant.

The objective of the symposium is to be a venue for Yellow-billed Cuckoo researchers to share their research and identify collaboration opportunities across the cuckoo’s full annual life cycle range. Presentations include a diversity of topics including modeling habitat occupancy and use, emerging research techniques, restoration, social science integration, and migratory connectivity. The Yellow-billed Cuckoo is a long-distance migratory bird species that is widely-distributed across North America during its breeding season. It has, however, experienced a steep population decline (>60%) over the last 35 years across its range. The decline of western populations has been particularly severe leading to the listing of the western population as federally threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act in 2014.The Western Yellow-billed Cuckoo was included as one of Road to Recovery’s (R2R) pilot species working groups to apply and test the R2R framework for achieving sustainable bird population recovery by bringing together both biological and social sciences. The Working Group and its members have made great strides with advancing the knowledge base on the Western Yellow-billed Cuckoo and are now working to identify the key factors and management actions needed to reverse population declines.

Collaborative sampling and analysis to inform avian conservation across scales

David C. Pavlacky, Jr., Adrian P. Monroe

This symposium will highlight cross-scale applications from the Integrated Monitoring in Bird Conservation Regions program with speakers from the collaborative network, featuring perspectives from academic, government, and nonprofit scientists as well as land and wildlife managers.

The focus of this symposium is to highlight the Integrated Monitoring in Bird Conservation Regions (IMBCR) program as a nexus for cooperative partnerships to define questions and collect representative data across multiple land jurisdictions. Presentations will feature partner perspectives, bioregional research, data integration, and translation into action and engagement, with themes represented in a panel discussion.  The statistically rigorous design of IMBCR, now in its 17th year, is well-positioned to quantify spatiotemporal population dynamics from local to ecoregional scales.  Although the big data revolution has brought unprecedented volumes of unstructured data to investigate large-scale questions at ecoregional and decadal scales, understanding the influence of local disturbance or conservation action on regional bird populations depends on high-resolution data to quantify in situ ecological relationships. The IMBCR program embraces a hierarchical frame of reference, with local ecological processes nested within management units, landscapes, and ecoregions, and this perspective is fundamental to interpreting local environmental effects in the context of processes operating at broader spatial and temporal scales. Accordingly, cross-scale linkages foster diverse partnerships within social-ornithological systems and mechanistic understanding of interactions between local and regional processes necessary to conserve bird populations.

Strategic public engagement to support bird research and conservation goals

Emily Cohen, Joely DeSimone, Cat Davis

Using a social science approach, this symposium explores broader outcomes of public engagement efforts that extend beyond knowledge gains, concluding with a facilitated discussion to connect those interested in strategic public engagement and considering associated benefits and challenges.

Consistent with calls for the scientific community to expand science communication in ways that support dialogue, shift beliefs, and build trust and relationships, this symposium will address public engagement with avian research and conservation. Presenters will introduce attendees to strategic approaches derived from social science theory that center on long-term engagement goals that are directly supported by short-term measurable outcomes, which include and expand beyond knowledge gains (i.e., broader outcomes such as demonstrating scientists are competent, willing to listen, motivated by a desire to help society, and share values with other community members). Then, leaders from bird banding stations will offer a view-from-the-field that explores applying these goals and outcomes to real-life engagement settings. In the final 30 minutes, attendees and presenters will discuss and reflect on broader outcomes including their application in other settings and associated benefits and challenges. This symposium will have broad appeal to all ornithologists who engage the public in their research and are interested in improving their communication and building connections with others interested in strategic public engagement. This symposium will be co-led by professionals with expertise in social science and bird research, and will feature presentations from banding stations who work with diverse visitors in rural to suburban settings.