Symposia
Symposia
One Health Approaches to Raptor Conservation
Description: One Health encompasses and describes the interactions of humans, wildlife, domestic species with their ecosystems. However, the definition of One Health has dramatically varied since its inception and remains somewhat controversial. Originally, the focus of One Health was primarily on the transmission of disease from wildlife to humans, with consideration of intermediate involvement by domestic species. More recently, the One Health concept has broadened to encompass the interactions of humans, their communities and wildlife with ecosystem health and resilience. Raptors occupy a high level on the food web and are affected by the availability of prey as impacted by humans, climate change, and other environmental factors. These environmental stressors range from exposure to pollutants, reduced habitat quality, diminished prey availability, poisoning, trafficking, and disease. It is essential to understand the effects of these complex stressors on the health on individuals and raptor populations. The focus of this session is to review health metrics, including monitoring in combination with non- or minimally invasive measures for assessing immune, reproductive, overall health, and stress in field studies. Information gathered will provide short- and long-term documentation of individual and population health. The One Health framework will be discussed as an approach for local, regional, and country wide response to environmental issues. Specific examples as applied to raptors will be discussed.
Organizers: Mary Ann Ottinger (maotting@central.uh.edu) and William W Bowerman (wbowerma@umd.edu)
The Movement Ecology of Raptors and its Implications for Conservation
Description: The movement ecology of raptors has critical conservation implications for local, regional, and global raptor populations. Past raptor studies often focused on nest sites and migration bottlenecks, and consequently conservation has mostly been directed to those sites. The ability to track individuals and look at movement ecology can reveal what is important away from the nest and throughout their full annual cycle. The knowledge gathered can support conservation of raptors on migration and wintering sites as well as non-breeding individuals. This symposium will provide an opportunity for researchers studying movement ecology to showcase their successes, and their methods. As relatively large birds, raptors are often at the forefront of new tracking technologies because they can carry early, larger models of each technology, before the tech is refined and miniaturized for smaller birds. This means raptor researchers lead the way investigating many aspects of movement ecology. This symposium will bring together decades of data from old and new technologies and analysis techniques to learn what has been discovered and how that can be applied to conservation. This symposium will first explore small scale movements of home range and habitat use. A better understanding of how birds use the landscape is important to managing their habitats. We will then select presentations documenting dispersal from the natal area, or release sites, to investigate colonization dynamics, crucial to assessing the ability of species and their adaptability to factors such as climate change and re-introductions. Finally, the symposium will highlight the spectacular migrations raptors make and consider what affects their routes and timing and what dangers raptors encounter during their journey.
Organizer: Sean Walls, Avian Segment Director at Lotek (swalls@lotek.com) and James Dwyer, EDM International, Inc., (jdwyer@edmlink.com)