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EURING Newsletter - Volume 3 - July 2001 FOREWORD Dear Colleagues and friends, Over two years have passed (unfortunately!) since the publication of the last newsletter, and EURING has been very active in this period. Following a proposal by Niels Otto Preuss, and thanks to the support offered by Franz Bairlein and the Vogelwarte Helgoland, the first 100 years of bird ringing have been celebrated by EURING on the famous island of Helgoland in October 1999, with a very interesting international conference. The meeting attracted 239 participants from 39 countries and 5 continents, just as a confirmation of the world-wide use of this important and versatile research technique after one century of existence. Two volumes of proceedings have been published, which offer an excellent overall view of the many important scientific achievements which had been impossible without the method of bird ringing. A special issue of Ardea (Vol. 89 (1), special issue, 2001: 1-252), edited by the EURING General Secretary Lukas Jenni together with Kees Camphuysen contains a total of 21 papers from plenaries and a selection of invited talks, while a Jubilee issue of Die Vogelwarte (Vol. 40 (4): 249-318), edited by Peter Berthold and Wolfgang Winkel offers 10 more interesting papers. On the occasion of the Helgoland meeting, also the EURING General Assembly was held, with the largest representation ever of member and associate member schemes. As will also be confirmed by the summary results of the questionnaire, much development has taken place in data management at many of the ringing schemes within the last few years, also thanks to the increasing support in data entry offered by the ringers. In order to improve our EURING code and update it to the present situation of computer use, Gerrit Speek produced a revised version. A special committee with Gerrit, Jacquie Clark, Rinse Wassenaar and Xenon Rohde has been established and is actively working now on the final version of the new code, which will surely improve the quality and exchange of data. As for data use, the last analytical meeting, held in California in October 2000, was a new milestone in the development of statistical models for increasingly detailed analyses on many aspects of bird demography, management and conservation. Recently, thanks to the support kindly offered by the BTO, a EURING web site has been established, at www.euring.org. This is located on a web server at the BTO and we hope that it will provide a web gateway to the EURING community. The site contains contact and web site details for all EURING schemes. All schemes have now the opportunity to contribute to the site with information on ringing projects and results, links and announcements, as this site will surely provide a useful service for EURING. The EURING Swallow Project is positively developing also through an increasingly large geographical coverage, and is building up a unique data base on movements and population parameters. All these activities confirm that ringing is positively developing and that EURING is playing a leading role in promoting the evolution of this technique, which with good reasons has entered the new Millennium. Fernando
Spina
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