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THE WILSON JOURNAL OF ORNITHOLOGY • Vol 124, No. 4. December 2012 
Wilson Ornithological Society to all students who 
received travel awards to the annual conference. 
However, this is not done during NAOC years. 
Over the past 12 years there has been declining 
membership in the WOS and other ornithological 
societies. Since 2000 the WOS lias declined in 
membership by 28.6%. In comparison, the 
American Ornithologists' Union has declined bv 
22.7%, the Association of Field Ornithologists by 
27.9%. and the Cooper Ornithological Society by 
35.5%. The Raptor Research Foundation and the 
Waterbird Society have remained relatively sta¬ 
ble, but with much smaller overall memberships. 
Mark E. Deutsclilander, Chair 
REPORT OF THE UNDERGRADUATE 
OUTREACH COMMITTEE 
At the last Council Meeting the Undergraduate 
Outreach Committee set the goal of compiling a list 
of colleges and universities offering opportunities 
for ornithological research to undergraduate stu¬ 
dents. We hope that through such a list links can be 
established between experienced mentors and 
talented beginning students. Our simple starting 
criterion was institutions sending undergraduates to 
make oral or poster presentations at recent WOS 
Annual Meetings. 
In the course of this effort we have document¬ 
ed the contributions of graduate and undergrad¬ 
uate students to oral and poster presentations at 
WOS meetings over the last 5 years (2007— 
2011). On average, students overall have given 
about half the podium presentations (// = 201 of 
408) and about two-thirds of the posters (« = 147 
of 238) at our recent meetings. Undergraduate 
students have given about one in 10 of the oral 
presentations (n = 37) and about a third of the 
posters (// = 78). We discovered that WOS does 
not consistently archive records distinguishing 
undergraduate from graduate students. However, 
over the 3 years we were able to analyze (2007- 
2009). undergraduate students making presenta¬ 
tions at our meetings came from 24 different 
colleges and universities. By way of comparison, 
in 2011 WOS budgeted $7,500 in support of 
student participation in the Annual Meeting 
(banquet tickets, memberships, travel grants, 
and presentation awards), an amount less than 
4% of annual expenditures. 
The committee recommends compiling the 
information necessary to track undergraduate and 
graduate student presentations at the time of each 
yearly meeting as a valuable ongoing assessment 
metric lor WOS. We welcome any notes from 
meetings prior to 2007 that would allow us to 
perfect and extend our retrospective analysis. 
Douglas W. White, Chair 
