“Seabirds:
Linking the Global Oceans” was the theme of the
1^st World Seabird Conference which took place from 7-11
September in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Initiated
by the Pacific Seabird Group, the Conference was organized
in conjunction with 25 other professional seabird and
research organizations from around the globe.

The goal
of this Conference was to put seabird management and
conservation into a worldwide perspective and comprehensively
address global issues and data needs for this group
of birds.

The AEWA species list includes a good number of seabirds
last extended in 2008 by the 4^th session of the Meeting
of the Parties through the addition of 20 new seabird species.
The AEWA Technical Officer Mr. Sergey Dereliev represented
the UNEP/AEWA Secretariat at the Conference and attended
a number of presentation sessions and workshops. Useful
meetings with potential contributors to the Agreement’s
seabird work were held in the margins of the conference.

The Conference featured a very ambitious scientific programme
with over 700 presentations including over 120 invited
papers, 120 contributed papers and 360 posters. Amongst
the session topics were climate change and ecosystem
dynamics of world oceans, interactions between seabirds
and fisheries, marine debris, by-catch marine protected
areas, various aspects of demography, ecology and biology.
Presentations were distributed in five parallel sessions
daily, also including workshops.

A series of legacy workshops
were convened to discuss issues related to the establishment,
facilitation and/or improvement of access to, and use
of, information and data. This was with the view of achieving
the objectives of the Conference aiming at generating
better communication and collaboration between seabird
researchers and organizations by facilitating improved
interaction between existing seabird groups through establishing
a formal coalition of relevant bodies and a web-based
communication system and establishing better opportunities
and systems for assembling and linking appropriate data.
Workshop topics covered seabird databases and colony
register, population and productivity indices, and the seabird
web portal – a recently
launched internet site designed as a one-stop gateway for
information on the world’s seabirds.

One of the workshops looked at the need
and interest of establishing a permanent World Seabird
Governing Committee. It was decided that such a structure
will be useful and it should represent all seabird groups
with a core group featuring different geographical regions.
An interim committee will be recruited from the organizations
on the current Conference International Steering Group
which will recruit new members from other seabird groups.
All those involved agreed that the 1^st WSC was
a great success and that the Committee should start planning
for
the organization of the next World Seabird Conference.