Beyond the scientific sessions, the 2027 Annual Meeting offers round tables and workshops where attendees can share updates, compare findings, build skills, and start collaborations. Browse this year’s sessions below.
Presenting on one of these topics? Oral and poster presentations related to round table and workshop topics are encouraged. Abstract Deadline to Dec. 5 |
Round Tables |
Purpose and goals: This round table will bring together representatives from various monitoring organizations to share in-the-moment updates regarding the 2026-2027 El Niño and impacts to marine bird populations as measured (to date) by beached bird monitoring, with the addition of at-sea and on-colony surveys in the spring and summer. We will discuss cooperative funding and publication possibilities that the group may wish to pursue.
Convenor: Florence Sullivan, Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (mflovt@uw.edu)
Purpose and goals: Salish Sea State of the Birds is a synthesis of status and trends developed by Audubon Washington with support from regional partners. Drawing on published literature and long-term monitoring data from both Canada and the US, the assessment provides a transboundary synthesis of current conditions and conservation concerns. This round table will serve two primary purposes: 1) it will provide an opportunity for seabird researchers, managers, and practitioners to review and ground-truth findings from the assessment and help identify areas where the synthesis aligns with or differs from observations and insights from the field; 2) it will engage participants to identify conservation implications of the findings through discussion of priority species, threats, management needs, and key research and monitoring gaps. The intended outcome of the session includes a set of expert-informed conservation priorities for Salish Sea seabirds and recommendations for future research and monitoring investments. By bringing together scientific and management expertise from across the Pacific, the session will help translate assessment findings into a shared set of conservation priorities that can guide future policy, management, and conservation action throughout the region.
Convenor: Anna Vallery, Audubon Washington (anna.vallery@audubon.org)
Purpose and goals: This round table will bring together folks whose work involves brown pelicans to share single-slide presentations on recent trends, including breeding success, beach survey mortality, rehabilitation intakes and injury types, at-sea observations, and tracking. The session will conclude with a discussion on shared patterns, emerging threats, and opportunities for collaboration, with the hopes of publishing a post-meeting synthesis paper.
Convenors: Amelia DuVall and Tamara Russell, University of Washington and Scripps Institution of Oceanography (ameliaduvall@gmail.com and tmrussel@ucsd.edu)
Purpose and goals: Drones, camera traps, and other imaging tools have expanded what seabird surveys can capture, but manual processing has become a major bottleneck between data collection and usable information. Computer vision models can now detect and classify birds in survey imagery, yet survey methods and detection tools have largely evolved in isolation. This combination round table and workshop will work towards reliable and reproducible workflows that suit the needs of seabird practitioners. People who have developed workflows for automating image processing across different seabird survey situations will present examples to show how the methods work in practice and demonstrate their successful workflows. A round table discussion will then draw on presentations as well as the recent World Seabird Conference workshop, where practitioners worked through considerations of monitoring programs when adopting these methods and what the field needs to build to support them. The discussion and its outcomes will contribute to a collaborative paper from the WSC workshop. Following a break and time for conversation, participants will move into a hands-on workshop, working through an object-detection workflow with Double-crested Cormorant colony imagery, providing a chance to gain experience with all the steps, from annotating images to assessing model accuracy. Participants will work on a simplified, prepared dataset and workflow derived from Wilkin et al. (2025). They will practice selecting images suitable for annotation and drawing bounding-box annotations, and facilitators will show how a detection model is trained. Participants will then generate predictions with a pre-trained model and assess its accuracy against their own annotations using precision, recall, and F1-score. All tools run in a web browser, so participants need to bring their own laptop.
Convenors: Anna Vallery, Audubon Washington (anna.vallery@audubon.org); Thor Veen, Lumax Ecological Analytics (thor@lumax.ai); Ruth Joy, Simon Fraser University (rjoy@sfu.ca)