Wednesday, July 06, 2016

Raymond Danner, UNCW assistant professor of biology, and four other researchers from universities in the U.S., Canada and South Africa will preside over a symposium at the 2016 North American Ornithological Conference in Washington, D.C., in August. The symposium, “Surviving the Heat,” will explore how birds respond to changes in climate.

The NAOC, hosted by the Smithsonian Institution, will be held Aug. 16-20. The conference will feature lectures by world experts, workshops, roundtable discussions and interactive sessions and symposia on a vast array of topics such as systematics and taxonomy, reproductive biology, population and community ecology, ecotoxicology and conservation biology.

“This is one of the largest ornithological conferences in the world, and to be chosen to lead a symposium from among many excellent proposals speaks well of Dr. Danner’s expertise,” said Christopher Finelli, chair of the UNCW Department of Biology and Marine Biology. “It is a real testament to Dr. Danner’s impact on the scientific community and to the caliber of faculty that we’re able to attract to UNCW.”

The symposium was assigned one of the coveted daylong slots during the conference.

“I proposed the symposium, along with international colleagues, because there is growing interest in predicting how animals respond to heat waves, such as the recent heat wave in the southwestern U.S., which left several people dead, caused widespread bird nesting failures and likely mortality and other effects on wildlife,” Danner said. The symposium will bring together 17 speakers from disparate scientific disciplines to address the topic from many different perspectives.

His fellow organizers are Blair O. Wolf, University of New Mexico; Andrew E. McKechnie, University of Pretoria, South Africa; Susan J. Cunningham, University of Cape Town, South Africa; and Glenn J. Tattersall, Brock University, Canada.

-- Tricia Vance

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