Congratulations Mu-Ming!!!!
Mu-Ming Lin has been working to improve our knowledge about conserving threatened species.
We are so delighted and proud that Mu-Ming Lin has submitted her wonderful PhD thesis on the ecology and conservation of the globally threatened Black-faced Spoonbill! With an intrepid field campaign that took Mu-Ming across the wetlands of East Asia, she battled through difficult COVID restrictions and still managed to produce an outstanding PhD thesis! We are constantly inspired by Mu-Ming’s dedication to creating high quality science, and her important contributions to conservation in the East Asian-Australasian Flyway.
The Black-faced Spoonbill is a huge conservation success story. It had declined to just a few hundred individuals and was on the verge of extinction, but recovered quickly as a result of conservation actions. Yet this recover varied in speed from place to place. Mu-Ming studied this variation to try to understand what works for the conservation of this species. She showed that the birds are rather adaptable in their migration route and choice of wintering grounds, which might be important in explaining their quick recovery. The birds, however, are quite tied it particular breeding grounds, so it is important those sites are well protected.
While Mu-Ming showed that the survival rate of this is rather high, she discovered important differences in seasonal survival probabilities among wintering regions, potentially due to habitat conditions during winter or northward migration.
Finally, in a landmark study that has already been published in Biological Conservation, Mu-Ming showed that the spoonbill is more abundant in wintering sites where conservation management is being undertaken, showing the importance of decisive action for recovering this species. Mu-Ming reflects in a final chapter what all this means for the Red List status of this species, concluding that downgrading its threat assessment too quickly could result in critical conservation measures being withdrawn too soon.
Well done Mu-Ming, we have immensely enjoyed working with you and co-supervisor Dr Chi-Yeung Choi from Duke Kunshan University on this project, and look forward to following your story and that of the spoonbills over the coming years!
