Arie van Noordwijk¹ & Terry Oatley²

1Netherlands Institute of Ecology, P.O. Box 40, 6666 ZG Heteren, The Netherlands, e-mail noordwijk@cto.nioo.knaw.nl, South Africa Avian Demography Unit, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, 7700, South Africa, e-mail Rabun@uctvms.uct.ac.za

van Noordwijk, A.J. & Oatley, T. 1999. The involvement of amateur ringers in population studies: The EURING swallow project. In: Adams, N.J. & Slotow, R.H. (eds) Proc. 22 Int. Ornithol. Congr., Durban: 216. Johannesburg: BirdLife South Africa.

The European Ringing Centres (EURING) are developing programmes for the large scale co-ordinated study of the population ecology of a chosen species. The improved methodology in calculating survival rates and increased efficiency in data handling made possible by the availability of PC's to many amateurs create the opportunity to address new questions. The main questions of the programme are: (1) What is the variation in reproduction, in local recruitment and in adult survival rates between different areas in Europe and among habitat types and how much dispersal can be detected within and among the study areas? (2) Where do the Barn Swallows Hirundo rustica fatten and roost during migration? (3) Where do the various European populations winter in Africa? The co-operation with SAFRING, the African ringing centres, in this third part of the study will provide a transcontinental co-operation at a new scale. The purpose of this symposium is to present the structure and the plans of this mega-project, which we believe to set new standards for a large scale co-ordinated project, as well as to present initial results from the pilot phase.