Fitz News in Africa - Birds & Birding: "An eye to the future"

PFIAO. 2010. An eye to the future. Africa - Birds & Birding 15(5):22-23.

"The past 50 years have seen significant changes to the ways in which science is conducted. In 1960, when the Fitztitute was founded, ornithology centred around field observation, the study of museum skins, ringing programmes and some basic laboratory experiments. The structure of DNA had been discovered only seven years previously, the first wildlife satellite-tracking project was still nine years from being implemented, micro-processors were more than a decade away, and the first commercially available GPS unit was more than three decades distant. The technological toolkit available to scientists has grown exponentially since the 1980s and we are now able to gather data at rates that our ornithological predecessors could only dream of. In addition to increasingly powerful computers, three fields have witnessed the greatest advances: tracking the movements of individual birds, the remote sensing of physiology, and the use of genetic tools to address questions ranging from behavioural ecology to unravelling the Tree of Life." More...