Published November 26, 2025
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Assessing exchange rates of individuals between biogeographical populations of East Asian goose and swan species

Creators

  • 1. State Key Laboratory of Regional and Urban Ecology, Research Center for Eco‐Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100085 China
  • 2. Chinese Academy of Sciences
  • 3. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100049 China
  • 4. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
  • 5. Wildlife Sciences and Conservation Center of Mongolia Union Building, B‐701, UNESCO Str Ulaanbaatar 14210 Mongolia
  • 6. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution, Russian Academy of Sciences Moscow 119071 Russia
  • 7. Russian Academy of Sciences
  • 8. Institute of Biological Problems of the North, Far East Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences Magadan 685000 Russia
  • 9. Federal Center for Analysis and Assessment of Technogenic lmpact Moscow 117105 Russia
  • 10. Institute of Biology, Mongolian Academy of Sciences Ulaanbaatar 13330 Mongolia
  • 11. The Miyagi Prefectural Izunuma‐Uchinuma Environmental Foundation 17–2 Shikimi, Wakayanagi Kuriharashi Miyagi 989–5504 Japan
  • 12. Korea Institute of Environmental Ecology Daejeon 34014 Korea
  • 13. School of Physics, University of Science and Technology of China Hefei 230026 China
  • 14. University of Science and Technology of China
  • 15. Department of Ecoscience Aarhus University C.F. Møllers Allé 8 DK‐8000 Aarhus C Denmark
  • 16. Aarhus University

Description

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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