Grand challenges at the frontiers of bird science

Abstract

Birds stun us with their feats of flight. Their beauty, jaw-dropping vocal performances, courtship displays and even their ingenuity capture our attention. We share the planet with feathered creatures who signal trouble ahead and, all at once, reveal incredible resilience to change. Our fascination with birds engenders concern that they prosper despite human influences on our shared environment. Birds possess a gravitational pull on our attention. Birds matter.Despite the disproportionate attention birds receive, we have much to learn about them. An abundance of scientific studies on birds-wild, captive and domesticated alikereveals that their overall complexity as biological organisms and, particularly their mobility, raises challenges. Characterizing the cutting edge of knowledge in any field of study is the grand challenge of all grand challenges. It is analogous to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. By the time you identify it, it has already moved and you are wrong. To reduce the chances of mischaracterizing the current edge of knowledge, one can prognosticate and extrapolate. What are the directions we are heading in scientific studies of birds? Are looming technological solutions about to remove former barriers and allow rapid progress soon? With continual reduction in size and improvements in power and precision of tracking devices, for example, we stand to radically improve our understanding of avian movements and migration (Bridge et al., 2011). As the genomic, proteomic and transcriptomic revolution proceeds in concert with advances in computer science in the coming decades, numerous insights into the evolutionary history and biological functions of birds will be revealed. Many discoveries will be unexpected.Any one view of where a field of study is headed is necessarily biased toward the subdisciplines slightly better understood by the author than sub-fields rarely visited. With this admission in mind, I humbly offer a tiny sample of the grand challenges to be addressed in the next few decades in bird science. Improving the scientific value of collaborations between professionals and bird enthusiastsOrnithology has a long history of important contributions from non-professionals. Various monikers have been applied to such people, such as community or citizen scientists, amateur ornithologists, bird enthusiasts, and birders. Regardless of one's preferred term, the essential point is that hundreds of thousands of people across the world do not get paid to study birds yet have incredible knowledge about birds. Today, with continually increasing access to the internet, sharing that knowledge with other Frontiers in Bird Science frontiersin.org Robinson . /fbirs. .

Niche concept scale in space and time: evolutionary perspectives from tropical insectivorous birds

“…Testing the BCH is itself limited by the availability of relevant data, especially dietary data and functional linkages to morphology, behavior, and physiology. The ten questions in Section 3 are largely unanswerable presently without more such data on the natural history of diets, an important grand challenge for ornithologists and others (Robinson, 2022).…”