IER's Presence at the 2nd Congress of Ornithology of the Americas.

During the first week of August, the 2nd Congress of Ornithology of the Americas took place in Gramado, Brazil. Under the motto "Diversity of Voices in Bird Conservation" and featuring the logo of a "Tangara preciosa," over 400 participants from various countries gathered to share advancements and ideas about their research. Among them were 3 representatives from the IER: Gabriela Nuñez Montellano, Giselle Mangini, and Facundo Gandoy.

Over the course of 3 days, the event featured 6 plenary sessions, 5 symposia, 2 roundtable discussions, and more than 200 oral presentations and posters. Gabriela Nuñez Montellano and Facundo Gandoy presented progress on their study of the reproductive biology of the White-fronted Woodpecker (Melanerpes cactorum, Picidae) in a talk titled "How do environmental factors and social structure influence nest-site selection in the White-fronted Woodpecker?"

Among the congress activities, 12 workshops were conducted. Gabriela Nuñez Montellano and the ornitologiaS group (ornitologias.org) organized two of these workshops, both titled "Building Connections to Reimagine Neotropical Ornithology," where mechanisms generating inequality of opportunities and exclusion in ornithology were discussed, along with practices that promote the participation, belonging, and persistence of diverse individuals and ideas in ornithology. On their part, Giselle Mangini and Facundo Gandoy participated in two workshops hosted by Cornell University, titled "Documenting the Life Histories of South American Avifauna in Birds of the World," where they were trained in writing and publishing about the natural history of Neotropical species in the comprehensive digital repository, Birds of the World (birdsoftheworld.org), and "Best Practices for Using eBird Data: accessing and preparing eBird data for analysis in R," which provided tools for generating models of abundance and population trends using data from the citizen science platform eBird (eBird.org).

The stay in Gramado also included birding outings in the Serra Gaúcha region, where, alongside Dr. Facundo Di Sallo from the Institute of Subtropical Biology, they explored the Paraná Pine forest (Araucaria angustifolia) and the northeastern edge of the Pampas, observing endemic bird species of Brazil such as Ortalis squamata and Cinclodes pabsti, as well as emblematic endangered birds of the Southern Cone like Xanthopsar flavus.