Seabirds: Linking the Global Oceans

“Seabirds: Linking the Global Oceans” was the theme of the 1^st World Seabird Conference which took place from 7-11 September in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Initiated by the Pacific Seabird Group, the Conference was organized in conjunction with 25 other professional seabird and research organizations from around the globe.

The goal of this Conference was to put seabird management and conservation into a worldwide perspective and comprehensively address global issues and data needs for this group of birds.

The AEWA species list includes a good number of seabirds last extended in 2008 by the 4^th session of the Meeting of the Parties through the addition of 20 new seabird species. The AEWA Technical Officer Mr. Sergey Dereliev represented the UNEP/AEWA Secretariat at the Conference and attended a number of presentation sessions and workshops. Useful meetings with potential contributors to the Agreement’s seabird work were held in the margins of the conference.

The Conference featured a very ambitious scientific programme with over 700 presentations including over 120 invited papers, 120 contributed papers and 360 posters. Amongst the session topics were climate change and ecosystem dynamics of world oceans, interactions between seabirds and fisheries, marine debris, by-catch marine protected areas, various aspects of demography, ecology and biology. Presentations were distributed in five parallel sessions daily, also including workshops.

A series of legacy workshops were convened to discuss issues related to the establishment, facilitation and/or improvement of access to, and use of, information and data. This was with the view of achieving the objectives of the Conference aiming at generating better communication and collaboration between seabird researchers and organizations by facilitating improved interaction between existing seabird groups through establishing a formal coalition of relevant bodies and a web-based communication system and establishing better opportunities and systems for assembling and linking appropriate data. Workshop topics covered seabird databases and colony register, population and productivity indices, and the seabird web portal – a recently launched internet site designed as a one-stop gateway for information on the world’s seabirds.

One of the workshops looked at the need and interest of establishing a permanent World Seabird Governing Committee. It was decided that such a structure will be useful and it should represent all seabird groups with a core group featuring different geographical regions. An interim committee will be recruited from the organizations on the current Conference International Steering Group which will recruit new members from other seabird groups. All those involved agreed that the 1^st WSC was a great success and that the Committee should start planning for the organization of the next World Seabird Conference.