SOC Annual Conference and AGM

Tom's talk will focus on the recovery of Fife's Corn Buntings: a conservation success story involving collaboration between the RSPB, farmers, researchers, and citizen scientists.

Tom is a lifelong birdwatcher and keen hillwalker from Edinburgh. He recently graduated from the University of St Andrews with a BSc in Ecology and Conservation, and will be starting a Master's at Durham University in October. During his time in St Andrews, he was President of the student birding society and was involved in the Fife Corn Bunting Project during the completion of his final-year dissertation.

Scotland is emerging as a haven for several colonising and rare breeding birds, with some species shifting northwards, consistent with climate-driven range expansion, and others showing more positive population trends here than elsewhere in Britain. By drawing together population trends and climate suitability projections, this talk will highlight Scotland’s opportunities for positive change in supporting rare breeding bird species, while emphasising the need to balance climate-driven opportunities with habitat management and conservation action.

Faezeh is a first year PhD student at Durham University. Working in collaboration with Natural England, her PhD research project seeks to understand the potential impacts of changes in climate and land use on rare breeding birds in Britain.

What does the gold standard of youth engagement look like and why does it matter? Youth engagement should be more than just giving young people a seat at the table. The bigger picture is about real influence, helping to shape decisions and driving change. Too often it feels tokenistic, but when done well, incorporating a youth voice can bring creativity, energy, and urgency to challenges like the climate crisis and social justice. For this to happen, organisations need to trust young people, share resources, and give us space to lead.

Katie currently studies ecology and conservation at the University of St Andrews. She has volunteered on various youth panels across the years including RSPB, BTO and Cairngorms Connect helping to inspire younger generations to protect the environment. Recently, she completed a 107 day hike from Land's End to John o’ Groats raising funds for the Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust, affirming her love for anything outdoors. She is particularly enthusiastic about breaking down the stigma and barriers surrounding nature-based actions, and increasing the access to the outdoors.

Martin will share some of the magic of museum bird collections, showing how these biological archives can shed new light on our avifauna. Among other things, he will talk about the collections as the only archives of extinct birds - and how they may contribute to finding possibly extinct species in the wild. He will describe how the collections can act as warning bells for environmental problems or even reflect evolution on human timescales, and will give examples of some very unexpected findings, such as the world’s first record of a species. He will also talk about how we can all make the collections become an even better resource for current and future research.

Martin Wintersparv Stervander is a Swedish evolutionary biologist and ornithologist, specialising in speciation, flight loss, genomics and taxonomy. He earned his PhD at Lund University in 2015, and held a Swedish Research Council postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oregon followed by a Marie Skłodowska Curie fellowship at the Natural History Museum, where he was briefly Senior Curator of Birds. He then took up the same post at National Museums Scotland in 2023. His research uses both fieldwork and “museomics” to investigate how traits such as flight loss evolve, how populations diverge, and how environmental and genomic factors shape biodiversity. Speciation and taxonomy are some favourite topics! Alongside research and curation, he is the Managing Editor of Ornis Svecica, a core team member of AviList, and an active promotor of diversity in science.