Exciting news! This week (15 October) we published a paper on our decades-long Bar-tailed Godwit research in the East Atlantic Flyway – these are the godwits migrating from West Africa to the Siberian Arctic.
During the last decades Bar-tailed Godwits experienced changes in the tundra phenology. We detected a chain of effects suggesting that conditions in the temperate zone (that is, the Wadden Sea) determine the ability of Bar-tailed Godwits to cope with the climate-related changes in the Arctic.
The paper in Nature Communications can be accessed here. This paper is the product of the collaboration between Russian, USA and Dutch scientists, the migration watchers of trektellen.nl, and two Dutch groups of volunteer bird catchers – VRS Castricum and the Frisian Wilsterflappers. The paper is based on multiple long-term research programs, of which the benthic survey work by the Royal NIOZ in the Wadden Sea needs special mention.
Theunis Piersma was invited to write a blog accompanying the paper on the website of Nature Research Ecology & Evolution.
In this blog called, The natural history of our changing planet, Theunis describes the background of this long-term study, and he looks forward: “I hope that our paper helps establish political will to continue such observations. We should realize that, despite its key value, we cannot just rely on the thousands of hours of unpaid labour by keen amateur bird scientists.”
For publicity about our paper check here.
