The value of ringing for bird conservation

Ringing has been an important research tool for the conservation biologist over the last 100 years. Effective conservation of wild bird populations requires understanding of bird ecology and of the factors driving population change, and evidence that proposed conservation measures can be effective. Bird‐ringing studies can provide a wide range of data types to aid and inform this process, and in many cases these data are not available without the capture and marking of individual birds. We review the range of information available from bird ringing, and illustrate this with case studies where ringing has made a key contribution to the knowledge and subsequent conservation action applied to a particular bird population. The value to bird conservation is typically higher where a ringing study is well designed and targeted to answer specific questions of relevance to conservation. Therefore, there is potential for the conservation value of ringing to be improved in future through the development and encouragement of structured and targeted ringing projects, the integration of different data types collected from ringing, and increased collaboration between groups of ornithologists, including ringers and non‐ringers.