ECC 2003:Additional letter
2004-01-23  

The V^th European Crane Conference in Sweden

10 -13 April 2003.

Additional information about proceedings and decisions made at the conference.
The V^th European Crane Conference was organised in Sweden, April 10-13, 2003. In this message, we provide information about proceedings and decisions made during the conference.

1. Proceedings.

No proceedings will be published. Instead, we encourage all participants who contributed with oral and poster presentations at the conference to submit their papers to scientific journals. An abstract issue, with abstracts of all presentations, was published prior to the conference. The abstracts should be referred to as follows:

Author. 2003. Title. In: Lundin, G. & Hake, M. (Eds.): Abstracts of the Vth European Crane Conference, April 10-13, 2003, Flämslätt, Sweden, pp. xx-xx.

2. Decisions.

2.1.    The next European Crane Conference should be organised in Hungary 2006. Zolt Végvary kindly accepted to be responsible for the organising committee.

2.2.    A European group for dealing with conflicts between cranes and people in agricultural environments was established. Günter Nowald was elected as convener of the group.

2.3.    A letter from the European Crane Working Group should be sent to the authorities of Spain and Hungary, respectively, in order to enhance the protection of the important crane staging areas Gallocanta (Spain) and Hortobagy (Hungary). These letters were sent out 2003-05-01, dated 2003-04-13, when the decision was made.

2.4.    A letter from the European Crane Working Group should be sent to representatives from the Military Air Force of Spain and to the Air Force attachés of Spain and France, respectively, in order to establish a co-operation to make it possible to radio-track cranes from the air in winter.

2.5.    A petition should be filed to the local authorities of Skara (Skara kommun) about establishing a room at the regional library of Skara in honour of the late Dr. P.O. Swanberg, showing his ornithological literature. Thanks to the petition, this room was established in January 2004.

3. Other issues brought up during the conference.

Javier A. Alonso (Spain) suggested a change in the organisation of the European Crane Working Group (ECWG), particularly considering election of the chairman. He suggested that the chairman of the national crane working group which organises a crane conference should automatically be elected as the chairman of ECWG at the conference. This person should then be chairman until the next conference, and so on. No decision was made, but time should be set off for discussions on how to organise the ECWG in the future at the next conference in Hungary 2006.

For the Committee of the V^th European Crane Conference.