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Spring migration of pink-footed geese under threat

f Norway) in spring. On their migratory route north, the geese stop to feed on sheep pastures and emerging crops at Vesterålen in northern Norway so that they arrive in Svalbard in good enough condition to breed successfully.

Populations of the goose have almost doubled over the past twenty years, from between 23,000 and 30,000 in the 1980s to 45,000 today. This growth, coupled with loss of natural habitats, has forced geese to break their migration on farmland, and into conflict with farmers.

"While conditions on the breeding grounds have generally remained unaffected by human activities, the staging and wintering grounds have undergone dramatic changes as a result of human development. As a result, most wintering populations have changed from feeding on natural or semi-natural habitats to agricultural land," Klaassen says.

As well as helping to develop strategies to manage the conflict between farmers and geese, Klaassen's model could help ecologists predict how other species might respond to climate change. According to Klaassen: "We need tools to predict how organisms will respond to local and global changes, and such tools would be particularly useful if they could take into account adaptive behaviour. In the case of migratory birds, the implications of environmental change may be particularly difficult to predict because these animals use a succession of sites during their annual cycle."


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Source:Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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