EURING Newsletter - Volume 3 - July 2001

EURING 2000 CONFERENCE
by David R Anderson

COLORADO COOPERATIVE FISH & WILDLIFE RESEARCH UNIT
201 WAGAR BUILDING, COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY
FORT COLLINS, COLORADO 80523-1484 USA
E-mail: anderson@picea.cnr.colostate.edu

Approximately 80 biologists and biometricians from many parts of the world met at the Morconi Center in central California for EURING 2000. The week-long scientific conference began on Monday, October 2 with a full day of short courses. These courses provided background information on 10 topics. These sessions where chosen to allow integration into the main conference themes. The short courses have become a vital component of the recent EURING meetings and allow people the catch up on new material and ask for clarification before the main conference starts.

The 7 half-day scientific sessions started on Tuesday and concluded at noon on Saturday, with a full day of field trips on Thursday. The themes of the 7 scientific sessions were -

1. Evolutionary Biology
2. Modeling and Inference Using Individual Covariates
3. Bayesian Methods
4. Random Effects Models
5. Meta-populations, Multi-strata Models, Dispersal, Translocations
6. Formal Experiments with Ringer Birds
7. Direct Estimation of Lambda (finite population growth rate).

Each of the scientific sessions began with a plenary address and these were followed by 1 or 2 formal discussants. The remaining papers related directly to the seesion theme. Ample time for discussion followed nearly all papers.

Excellent posters were displayed during a special Poster Session during the conference. These posters were not 'rejected papers' but, rather, material that could best be presented as a poster. This session also allowed a maximum of interaction between the poster presenters and the rest of the people attending the conference.

Conference editors are working with reviewers with the hope of getting the full proceedings published in about one year. This is a large, but very important, undertaking. Everyone seemed to come away with new ideas and problems in need of solution.

The provision of a summary of the highest of the highlights is premature as the proceedings are yet to appear. Sessions 1-7 are all at the current state of the science. Everyone learned a great deal from the session on Bayesian methods and EURING 2003 will surely see more reports using this paradigm. The direct estimation of the finite rate of population growth is still in its infancy and will see more work on this exciting issue. I felt people were very interested in the concept of 'random effects' models and the notion of variance components. Few of us think hard enough to achieve a clean, formal experiment and the session of experiments sharpened perspectives on this fundamental issue. The session on evolutionary biology was very important (and placed first on the program). In the end, these issues are the important ones. This session spoke more to biology and less on methods and we need to maintain some balance in the EURING conferences.

I thank ALL that helped make EURING 2000 a very successful scientific meeting.

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