#BOU2024 – Resources
Urban birds
9-11 April 2024
Attendee resources
FULL PROGRAMME (In-person and X(Twitter) presentations)
DELEGATE PACK (INCL. ABSTRACTS)
ALFRED NEWTON LECTURE & KEYNOTE PRESENTERS
WORKSHOPS
WORLD CLOCK including UTC time conversion for your local time (for those following on X/Twitter)
Presenter resources
TWITTER PRESENTER GUIDELINES
HOW TO PREPARE A TWITTER THREAD
BE COLOUR BLIND AWARE
CODE OF CONDUCT
Conference theme, aims and scope
The expansion of urban environments is a key driver of global biodiversity loss and is likely to have an increasing impact in the future. By altering both the biotic and abiotic environment, the conversion of natural habitats into urban environments can profoundly affect the composition and persistence of avian communities. Yet, whilst urban environments present many challenges to birds – including the loss of natural habitats, and exposure to novel predators and stressors such as noise, light, and air pollution – they also present many opportunities. Milder climates and the availability of new resources has enabled some species to flourish. Although often regarded as highly degraded habitats, these complex ecosystems provide exciting opportunities to study ecological and evolutionary theory. With 20% of all bird species occurring in cities, it is essential that researchers, conservationists, and policy makers now come together to share their knowledge on the impacts of urbanisation on birds, and how avian diversity can be maintained in a changing world.
Covid safety
We have adopted a number of measures for BOU2024, intended to maximize covid safety at the conference.
- We will make hand sanitiser available in meeting and dining spaces.
- We will have surgical masks freely available at registration, for those that wish to wear them. Delegates are asked to respect the choice of others when it comes to mask wearing.
- We will consider a 50% refund for anyone unable to attend the in-person conference following a positive Covid-19 test.
- The lecture theatre, although enclosed, is spacious and allows for delegates to space out.
- Outdoor space is available for delegates to take some fresh air, should they wish, at any point during the conference. This includes access to outdoor space from meeting and dining spaces.
Our parallel conference format
The BOU strives to make all our events inclusive and accessible. To help achieve this we now run all in-person and virtual Zoom conferences as dual platforms events with a Twitter conference running alongside the main in-person/virtual event.
Every presenter at a in-person/virtual now tweets a summary of their in-person/virtual presentation as part of the parallel Twitter event. We will also include additional Twitter-only presentations during the breaks of the in-person/virtual event.
Recent virtual Zoom events have attracted an ‘in-the-room’ audience up to 3x that of an in-person event. Parallel Twitter events are delivering a like-for-like ‘in-the-room’ audience of up to 12x the in-person audience (and a wider reach of up to 750,000).
Unlike other social media platforms, Twitter is genuinely open access as you don’t even need an account to follow the Twitter event content. The BOU knows Twitter inside out having championed its use to promote ornithological research for the last decade and we’ve been running and sponsoring Twitter conferences for some years. Because of this take-up within our community is very high – 75% of BOU2019 delegates were on Twitter!
Presenters are provided with extensive guidelines on how to tweet your presentation on Twitter, and you will be able to use either your personal or institute account. If neither of these are available, then we the BOU social media team will be on hand to discuss other options for you to present your work on Twitter.
See also Presenting at a Twitter conference
Scientific Programme Committee
Christine Howard | Durham University, UK & BOU Meetings Committee (Chair)
Davide Dominoni | University of Glasgow, UK
Caroline Isaksson | Lund University, Sweden
Kate Plummer | British Trust for Ornithology, UK
Image credits
Top right: Juvenile Great Tit | Hédi Benyounes on Unsplash
Middle: House Sparrow | Zeynel Cebeci CC BY-SA 4.0 Wikimedia Commons