text by William Jones
Between the 22nd and 25th of September, the ÉLVONAL group had an excellent opportunity to meet in person before and during the International Wader Study Group Conference, held in Szeged. The 22nd was devoted to ÉLVONAL topics, with talks from a variety of ÉLVONAL collaborators on their field progress in 2022 and with updates from the lead authors on the four large ÉLVONAL papers that are at the heart of our research program.
Vojta, Cristina, Grant, Nolwenn and Narhulan presented the preliminary results for each of the main analyses on brood care, incubation, courtship and fidelity and all ended their talks with a request for a final push to get the remaining data from each field site uploaded to the database so that the analyses can be finished.
In addition, we had some interesting talks from the ÉLVONAL team on different aspects of shorebird evolutionary ecology and behaviour. Including movement ecology in White-faced Plovers, sperm morphology and its relationships with mating systems and the knowledge gaps and challenges presented by studying tropical shorebirds.
From the 23rd, our time was filled with the IWSG conference, the organisation of which was led by ÉLVONAL team members. ÉLVONAL work was prominently displayed in poster, talk and symposium forms. We were delighted to see that the best poster was won by Adam Kiss and his work with the Collared Pratincoles in Hungary, while Willam Jones’s proposal to track the movements of Kittlitz’s Plovers was the audience’s choice to win 5 Global Messenger trackers.
International Wader Study Group Annual Conference programme
ÉLVONAL SHOREBIRD SCIENCE 