AOU Committee on Bird Collections
Upcoming Workshops/Symposia
The AOU Collections Committee is planning a symposium for the AOU meeting in Portland, Oregon, 4-8 August 2008, entitled A Beginner’s Guide to Collecting and Preparing Museum Specimens. This symposium is intended primarily for students and other researchers who lack training in specimen collection and preparation. The Collections Committee is working with the Student Affairs Committee to engage a broad student audience. Tentative titles of talks are:
- What every Ornithologist should know about Museums
- Specimen Preparation 1, Skinning a Bird
- Specimen Preparation 2: Stuffing a Bird
- The Act of Collecting: Formalities, Firearms, and FieldNotes
- Specimen Preparation 3: Tissues, Skeletons, and Fluid preps
- Materials and Equipment for Collecting and Preparing Birds
A second collections-related symposium, entitled New Answers from Old Specimens, also is planned for the 2008 AOU meeting in Portland (co-organized by Marina Anciães, Carla Cicero, and A. Townsend Peterson). This symposium is intended to explore ORNIS and other large-scale projects aimed at integrating and enriching data associated with natural history museum specimens, and the implications that its exploration and analysis have for understanding various aspects of bird biology and conservation. Tentative titles of talks are:
- Accumulation of Knowledge of Birds in North American Biocollections Institutions
- Tracking and Forecasting the Spread of Avian Zoonoses (Influenza and West Nile Virus)
- Linking Phylogeography and Distributional Ecology
- Forecasting Avifaunal Consequences of Global Climate Change
- TBA
- The ORNIS Network: State of the Network and Where it is Going
Past Workshops/Symposia
Two pre-meeting workshops were held on Tuesday, 23 August 2005, at the AOU meeting in Santa Barbara, California.
A morning workshop, "Increasing Access to Avian Biodiversity Data," focused on current initiatives to develop distributed databases of avian collections data (ORNIS) and bird monitoring data (ORGANIZERS: Carla Cicero, A. Town Peterson, John Wieczorek, Steve Kelling).
An afternoon workshop, "Ask the experts: USFWS and USDA staff explain the rules and procedures for importing/exporting bird specimens," brought in top people from these agencies to clarify permit regulations pertaining to import/export (ORGANIZER: Ornithological Council).