Assessment finds limited population exchange among East Asian migratory waterbirds, indicating conservation management strategies must focus on breeding outcomes.
Effective conservation management of migratory waterbirds requires defining flyway populations sharing breeding, moulting, staging and wintering grounds discrete in time and/or space from others of the same species. The migration paths of 619 tagged and tracked individuals of 10 East Asian goose and swan populations showed no exchanges between the traditionally defined flyways for nine of them. Two of 22 tracked adult Greylag Geese Anser anser moved between winter quarters in India and China, confirming that annual fluctuations in their counts reflect winter emigration/immigration as well as the balance of breeding success/mortality that governs annual abundance in closed populations. The absence of such changes in seven other species indicated restricted population exchange, giving confidence that monitoring wintering abundance and breeding success are reliable means of tracking their population trends and modelling population dynamics.
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