Effect of habitat loss and change on waterbirds

The tenth International Waterfowl Ecology Symposium was held at the University of Aveiro, Portugal, on 18-21 September 1995. Arranging this triannual Symposium is the responsibility of the Waterfowl Ecology Specialist Group of Wetlands International (previously known as the International Waterfowl and Wetlands Research Bureau, IWRB). The Symposium was attended by almost 200 people from all parts of the world. Its success in attracting contributions meant that, for the first time in its history, the Symposium had to be subdivided for part of each day into parallel sessions. There was also a very large number of posters, with a prize being awarded to the one that, on the basis of delegate votes, was the most original, innovative and informative. The Symposium covered many aspects of the ecology of waterbirds, but the majority at least touched upon the plenary theme. This theme was 'approaches to predicting the effects of habitat loss and change on populations of waterbirds and to detecting when populations have been affected'. This Proceedings volume contains many of the papers that, in a variety of ways, addressed this theme directly. In an attempt to benefit from the world-wide experience represented at the Symposium, we were particularly keen to include papers reporting attempts to make predictions before a loss of habitat or a habitat change had taken place. In these cases, authors were asked: 'With the benefit of hindsight, what research should we have done before the habitat was changed to have predicted what actually happened afterwards'. Several authors were able to answer this question, and their valuable experiences are reported here. However, many authors have not yet been able to test whether their expectations as to the effects of habitat loss and change have been realised. Their contributions describe a variety of studies designed to enable us to make better predictions in the future. The result is a series of papers which cover a wide range of issues relating to habitat loss and change across a variety of wetland habitats and species. As so many of the individual papers deal with several of the issues relating to the Symposium theme, we felt it was not helpful to force the papers into arbitrary groupings within these Proceedings. For this reason, papers are presented in alphabetical order of their senior author.