#BOUsci23 – Attendee resources
Global flyways
A synthesis of bird migration research
21 – 22 November 2023
Attendee resources
ATTENDEE GUIDE – all you need to know to attend this BOU Zoom conference
PROGRAMME
ABSTRACT BOOKLET
KEYNOTE ABSTRACTS
SLACK GUIDE
CODE OF CONDUCT
WORLD CLOCK including UTC time conversion for your local time
Important note: The conference timings are given in the programme in UTC/PST/CST. Use the above online scheduler app or ensure you check your local time for the event here.
Conference theme, aims and scope
Bird migration research is accelerating and diversifying at a very rapid pace. Novel techniques allow us to address new questions that would have been impossible to tackle just a few years ago. Much of this research is currently biased to species breeding in the global north. Nevertheless, increasingly exciting discoveries are arising from understudied species and flyways, not least by disadvantaged researchers from the Global South.
This event aims to bring together experts tackling a broad range of pressing topics in migration ecology across different flyways, and from diverse perspectives. Over the course of 24 hours, we will hold virtual meetings gathering researchers from the Africa-Eurasia, Americas and Asia-Pacific flyways.
This conference will help set the research agenda on flyway ecology for the coming decade, by presenting/revising and summarising the current knowledge, and by identifying avenues for future research. To this end, we will promote explanatory research while also considering descriptive studies and basic natural history. We explicitly welcome contributions that seek to improve inclusivity and accessibility of flyway-scale research networks and enable collaborative studies across large spatial scales.
To facilitate parallels across taxonomic and flyway boundaries, sessions will be organised according to broad themes including, but not restricted to:
- Generalizing migration: how do flyways differ? (e.g. multi-species and multi-population studies);
- Physiology of migration and flight endurance;
- Individual flexibility and environmental tuning of migratory behaviour;
- Between-individual variation and ontogeny of migration;
- Seasonal survival, carry-over effects and demography
- Responses of migrants to accelerating global change;
- Migrants shaping ecosystems (e.g. migrants as dispersal vectors);
- Flyway conservation: from shouting from the sidelines to effective action
- Tackling economic, linguistic and other barriers to flyway-scale research
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 event will now be required to tweet a summary of their 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.
For example, our BOUsci20 virtual Zoom event attracted an ‘in-the-room’ audience of 375 registrants, but the parallel Twitter event had over 550 participants, an ‘in-the-room’ audience of >1,600 people and a wider reach of 750,000 – from right around the world.
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 will be 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
Africa-Eurasia Flyway
Dr Wouter M.G. Vansteelant | Co-chair | University of Groningen, the Netherlands
Dr José A. Alves | Co-chair | University of Iceland, University of Aveiro, Portugal & BOU Meetings Committee
Vojtech Brlik | Charles University, Czech Republic
Dr Maria A. Dias | University of Lisbon, Portugal
Steve Dudley | Consultant, Scotland
Dr Catriona Morrison | University of East Anglia, UK & BOU Meetings Committee
Dr Elham Nourani | Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Germany
Americas Flyway
Dr Elly Knight | Co-chair | University of Alberta, Canada
Dr Camila Gómez | Co-chair | SELVA, Colombia
Fengyi Guo | Princeton University, United States
Dr Bryant Dossman | Georgetown University, United States
Asia-Pacific Flyway
Dr Yachang Cheng | Co-chair | Sun Yat-sen University, People’s Republic of China
Sayam Chowdhury | Co-chair | University of Cambridge, UK
Dr Yong Ding Li | BirdLife International, Singapore
Dr Judit Szabo | Charles Darwin University, Australia
Dr R. Suresh Kumar | Wildlife Institute of India, India
Batmunkh Davaasuren | Wildlife Science and Conservation Center of Mongolia, Mongolia
Image credit: Black-tailed Godwit (top right) | Frank Vassen CC BY 2.0 Wikimedia Commons