In November 2005, Migratory Birds biologist Tom Will attended a three-day workshop in Quito, Ecuador designed to better understand the ecology and distribution of the Cerulean Warbler on its wintering grounds in South America. 

The meeting brought together biologists and GIS experts from the U.S., Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia.  Tom helped facilitate a working session in which a biologist group and a GIS technical group madly sent messages back and forth asking for distributional data or clarifications on appropriate vegetation coverages. 

The efficiency and competence with which our Latin American colleagues solved difficult problems was truly impressive.  One outcome of the meeting was a presentation in August 2006 at the  ESRI International User Conference; Tom was a co-author on the resulting publication—Modeling the South American Range of the Cerulean Warbler—which will soon be posted on the ESRI website (http://training.esri.com/campus/library/confproc/index.cfm).