S04.1: The EURING swallow project: Amateur ringers in population studies

Over the past decades, the involvement of amateur ringers has been concentrated on ringing birds during migration. Both diminishing returns - much of what can be learned in this way has been learned - and new possibilities lead to a new type of project, where amateur ringers collect data following a plan and protocol organised by ringing centres. A major factor making such a project possible is that data entry by the ringers for the first time allows the processing of recaptures of locally ringed birds. At the Dutch ringing centre this has led to a quadrupling of recaptures and recoveries processed in a period in which administrative staff was halved. The Swallow project was started as a pilot and demonstration project for a new type of ringing concentrating on breeding populations of single species and documenting variation in breeding, survival and dispersal as main questions. In the later extension into a EURING project, the pre-migratory phase and the wintering biology have been included. Over the next decade, we will have to see whether the enormous potential work force of amateur ringers can lead to a new scale of studying the population biology of species in which studying variation among individuals within populations is combined with small and large-scale geographical comparisons.