Program

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Pre-Symposium Workshop on White-Nose Syndrome

Please note that all titles are preliminary 

Sessions

Migratory Connectivity and Phenology

Migratory connectivity designates the links between breeding areas, stopover sites and wintering areas of migratory animals. Methods for its study include banding, telemetry, population genetic markers and stable isotopes. Much of what is known about migratory strategies of bats results from analyzing the phenology of bat migration, such as the seasonal arrivals of migrants and their variations in sex ratios throughout the year.
(Organizers: Rainer Hutterer and Ana Popa-Lisseanu)

Physiology, Behavior and Bat Navigation

Migration is an energy-consuming process that may affect the physiology and behavior of bats. Fat deposition before winter must not only allow bats to survive hibernation, but also to sustain their long-distance flights. Migration affects the timing of other energetically expensive processes such as mating and reproduction and vice versa. Mechanisms for orientation and navigation are especially important for migratory bats that have to find their way across unknown landscapes.
(Organizers: Chris Guglielmo, Richard Holland and Christian Voigt)

Population Genetics and Mating Systems

Genetic markers can provide information about migratory directions in a broad scale. Population genetic analysis can also reveal which sex disperses, the degree of isolation of different populations, or whether separate breeding populations mix at hibernating sites. Because migration temporally overlaps, at least partially, with the mating season, it can affect the type of interactions between males and females, favoring certain types of mating systems over others.
(Organizers: Frieder Mayer and Gerald Wilkinson)

Human-Bat Conflict and Conservation of Migratory Bats

Migratory bats require many distinct and geographically separated landscapes and are thus especially difficult to protect. Forest destruction seriously affects the possibility of finding suitable roosts in breeding and wintering grounds and across migratory routes. Wind energy facilities kill significant numbers of migrating bats. Other human infrastructures, such as houses, can result in deadly traps for migrating bats in search of stop-over roosts. Recently, global climate change has been recognized as a major threat to migratory species.
(Organizers: Paul Cryan and Marie-Jo Duborg-Savage)

Tracking Resource Use in Space and Time

Seasonal migrations in insectivorous, frugivorous, nectarivorous bats have been linked to seasonal shifts in the ditributions of their food resources, largely on regional or continental scales. Diverse disciplines (e.g. meteorolgy, entomology, agronomics, phenology and climate change) provide fine details on distributions and shifts in distributions of the plant and animal resources that bats exploit, and on the movements of insects on many scales. New tools (e.g. GIS, remote sensing, refinements in telemetry, stable isotopes, fecal DNA) make it possible to link bats to their resources with great precision in both space and time. Thus, to the degree that migration in bats is driven by their ability to track the distributions of essential resources in space and time, we are better able to describe and understand these migrations.
(Organizers: Gary McCracken and Ran Nathan)

Migratory Bats and Emerging Infectious Diseases
(Organizers: Andrew Breed and Andreas Kurth)

Round-Table Discussion: Current Challenges and Future Perspectives

We encourage participants to take part in a discussion about current challenges for the study of bat migration and for the protection of migratory bats, future perspectives, and what conservational efforts can be achieved at both national and international levels.

Preliminary list of submitted contributions (titles shortened by the organizers)

A survey of bat mortalities at wind farms in the US
Activity patterns of migratory noctule bats
Aeroecology - the next frontier
Are river valleys corridors for migratory bats
Bat banding in Germany - results concerning bat migration
Bat fatalities at wind turbines in Germany
Bat migration and wind turbines
Bat migration at a geographical barrier
Bat migration at Helgoland, a remote island in the North Sea: assisted or wind drifted?
Bat migration in Estonia
Bat migration in Finland
Bat migration in Saudi Arabia
Bat migration in southern Finland
Bat migration in the western Baltic Sea region
Bat mortality in European wind farms
Bat navigation studied by high resolution GPS tracking
Behaviour of bats on migration at sea
Genetic population structure of the common noctule bat
Genetic population structure of two cryptic migratory pipistrellus species
Henipavirus in Ghanian fruit bats
Is the migration pattern of Noctul bats in change?
Long-distance movements by British bats indicated by stable isotope analysis
Measuring the risk of bat collisions at wind power plants
Migration and habitat occupancy in Hawaiian hoary bats
Migratory Miniopterus schreibersi in Abkhazia
Monitoring bat activities with infra-red cameras
Monitoring of bats and their collision with wind turbines
Orientation and navigation in bats
Pathomorphological changes in bats killed by wind turbines
Phenolog of bat migration in parts of Ukraine
Phenology of migratory bats at the Baltic Sea coast
Phenology, migration and winter activity of noctule bats
Radio-tracking migratory Eidolon helvum in Ghana
Roost selection by migratory bats
Sex-dependent migration of Myotis dasycneme
The development of bat migration theory
The role of the Caucasus for migratory bat species
among others ...

Banquet

We will close the scientific session of Saturday's program with an exceptional banquet held at the famous dinosaur hall of the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. You will be offered a buffet with mostly Mediterranean dishes, and while enjoying your meal you may take a journey 150 million years back in time. Look up, and you will be greeted by Brachiosaurus brancai, the largest reconstructed dinosaur skeleton on earth. And while enjoying your dessert you may visit the Archaeopteryx, not a fake replicate, but one of the original fossils. This unique experience comes at a very reasonable price of 45 € (30 € for students).

This event is co-hosted by the Berlin Museum of Natural History