Chang-Yong Choi

Seoul National University | SNU · Department of Agriculture, Forestry, and Bioresources

Radar is crucial tool for monitoring bird movements beyond the visible spectrum. This study aimed to examine the spatiotemporal movement patterns of wintering waterfowl in Cheonsu Bay, South Korea, using a marine surveillance radar system and to explore its potential for waterfowl monitoring. Radar observations were conducted for 1,965 minutes at s...

Two multi‐species heronries, inland and island, found in the northern part of Nyerere National Park in Tanzania are described. A total of 12 waterbird species were breeding. The inland heronry, located in a bushwillow patch amidst the open savanna habitat, hosted all 12 species. From the drone images taken at the inland heronry, we estimated 3492 i...

Geese have undergone significant changes in their distribution and population size due to human-induced impacts. To improve our understanding of the two main geese populations in East Asia—Greater White-fronted (Anser albifrons; GWFG) and Bean Geese (Anser fabalis sensu lato; BEAG), which includes the Tundra A. f. serrirostris (TDBG) and Taiga Bean...

The Eurasian Eagle-Owl (Bubo bubo) shows reversed sexual size dimorphism. We aimed to evaluate morphological size differences between the sexes of the smallest eagle-owl subspecies (B. b. kiautschensis), for which little morphometric information is available, and to develop a discriminant function for sex using a minimum number of morphometric para...

Background Climate change, land development, and increased outdoor human activity have increased the prevalence and distribution of tick-borne pathogens, causing public health issues. Asia is considered a pivotal region of emerging infectious diseases caused by zoonotic disease, thus requiring active research in Asian countries. Therefore, this stu...

Basic & descriptive information on the seasonal movements of Black-tailed gulls revealed by GPS tracking, as a preliminary step

Seabirds, considered key indicators of the oceanic environment, are avian species that are highly threatened by human activities. Because many colonial breeding seabirds rely on a single breeding site for their lifetime, understanding the population dynamics and philopatry of these breeding populations is vital for conservation efforts. This study...

Simple Summary The Lower Tumen River basin habitat at the Sino-North Korean border is crucial for reestablishing Amur leopards in the Korean Peninsula, where they once thrived. However, except for the Jingxin–Dapanling (JD) and Mijiang (MJ) corridors, most areas have become impassable due to human activities and urbanization. In this study, we eval...

Tick-borne diseases have a significant impact on human and animal populations, posing an increasing threat to public health, particularly in the context of climate change. Along with the various natural hosts of ticks, birds play a notable role in transmitting ticks and tick-borne pathogens, indicating the importance of monitoring flyways and es...

Tick-borne diseases have a significant impact on human and animal populations, posing an increasing threat to public health, particularly in the context of climate change. Along with the various natural hosts of ticks, birds play a notable role in transmitting ticks and tick-borne pathogens, indicating the importance of monitoring flyways and estab...

Recently, with the spread of infectious diseases worldwide, interest in zoonotic diseases related to wild animals has been increasing. East Asia is regarded as a key region for emerging infectious diseases caused by zoonotic pathogens introduced by wildlife. Ticks possessing zoonotic pathogens may be transferred to various geographical areas along...

Microplastics (< 5 mm) have been found in marine ecosystems worldwide, even in Antarctic ecosystems. In this study, the stomach and upper intestines of 14 dead gentoo penguin (Pygoscelis papua) chicks were collected and screened for microplastics on King George Island, a gateway to Antarctic research and tourism. A total of 378 microplastics were i...

Plastic pollution is distributed patchily around the world’s oceans. Likewise, marine organisms that are vulnerable to plastic ingestion or entanglement have uneven distributions. Understanding where wildlife encounters plastic is crucial for targeting research and mitigation. Oceanic seabirds, particularly petrels, frequently ingest plastic, are h...

Birds in flight are prone to collide with various transparent or reflective structures. While bird–window collision has been recognised as a critical conservation issue, collision with other transparent structures has been less understood. Noise barriers made of transparent materials are considered critical hazards for birds; however, little is kno...

Disturbances alter biodiversity via their specific characteristics, including severity and extent in the landscape, which act at different temporal and spatial scales. Biodiversity response to disturbance also depends on the community characteristics and habitat requirements of species. Untangling the mechanistic interplay of these factors has guid...

Migratory birds disperse ticks and associated tick-borne pathogens along their migratory routes. Four selected pathogens of medical importance (Coxiella burnetii, Rickettsia spp., Francisella tularensis, and Toxoplasma gondii) were targeted for detection in 804 ticks (365 pools) collected from migratory birds at Hong and Heuksan Islands in the Repu...

Sex differences in morphology provide key information for understanding a species’ morphological adaptations in relation to the evolution of sexual selection. In migratory birds, morphological traits have adapted to long-distance travel, and sexual dimorphism is typically related to sex-differential migration phenology. Little Buntings (Emberiza pu...

When free-ranging birds are accidentally killed or die, there may be greater potential for their associated ticks to detach, seek alternate hosts, and become established. We examined 711 carcasses of 95 avian species for ticks at a stopover island of migratory birds in the Republic of Korea where only Ixodes nipponensis and I. persulcatus were prev...

The widely held assumption that any important scientific information would be available in English underlies the underuse of non-English-language science across disciplines. However, non-English-language science is expected to bring unique and valuable scientific information, especially in disciplines where the evidence is patchy, and for emergent...

The endangered Black-faced Spoonbill (Platalea minor) strictly breeds in marine environments and is threatened by the rapid loss of coastal wetlands within its breeding range. Adults with chicks are thought to gradually switch feeding sites from freshwater wetlands to coastal mudflats as the chicks’ osmoregulatory system develops. We investigated a...

Samples from 29 adult Gentoo (Pygoscelis papua), Chinstrap (Pygoscelis antarcticus), and Adélie Penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae) at the King Sejong Station on Narębski Point, King George Island, Antarctica, were investigated to detect antibodies to avian influenza, Newcastle disease virus, infectious bursal disease virus, infectious bronchitis virus,...

With nearly 400 migratory landbird species, the East Asian Flyway is the most diverse of the world’s flyways. This diversity is a consequence of the varied ecological niches provided by biomes ranging from broadleaf forests to arctic tundra and accentuated by complex biogeographic processes. The distribution and migration ecology of East Asian land...

The extended distribution and potential introduction of exotic ticks and associated tick-borne pathogens along the northern and southern routes of migratory birds pose zoonotic tick-borne disease risks to wild and domestic animals and incidentally to humans. A knowledge of bird migratory patterns, species of attached ticks, and associated pathogens...

대륙검은지빠귀(Turdus mandarinus)는 중국의 중남부에 연중 서식하는 텃새이나, 국내에서도 서해안의 도서지역을 중심으로 봄 과 가을에 이동하는 소수 개체가 관찰된다. 특히 봄철에 관찰되는 개체는 일반적으로 중국의 남동부 번식지에서 우리나라로 분산하여 도래하는 개체들로 추정되어 왔다. 전북 군산시의 어청도에서 포획한 1년생 수컷에 소형 추적장치(3.9 g)를 부착하여 2020년 4월 26일부터 5월 13일까지 대륙검은지빠귀의 중간기착 및 이동 특성을 분석한 결과, 이 어린 새는 당초 예상과는 달리 국내로 유입되는 것이 아니라 서쪽으로 이동하여 중국 내 번식기 분포지(산둥성 린이시)로 돌아가는 개체임이 확인되었다...

Forests are increasingly affected by natural disturbances. Subsequent salvage logging, a widespread management practice conducted predominantly to recover economic capital, produces further disturbance and impacts biodiversity worldwide. Hence, naturally disturbed forests are among the most threatened habitats in the world, with consequences for th...

The most common target songbird for trapping and trade in Korea is the Tree Sparrow (Passer montanus) because 'grilled sparrows' are still regarded as a commercially-available delicacy in the market. To understand how small-scale trapping and self-consumption of songbirds occur by individuals in Korea, along with the commercial trade, we searched f...

The salt gland is a well-developed osmoregulation organ in marine birds, and its relative size often reflects an individual’s feeding environment and osmoregulation capability. The development and functions of salt glands have been described for the Adélie penguin (Pygoscelis adeliae), but this information has been poorly documented in the other tw...

The rapid decline of a few Emberiza bunting species is increasing conservation concerns, especially in Asia. However, temporal changes in communities and populations of buntings, ones of the most common migratory songbirds in Korea, have not been quantitatively assessed. To understand how the status of buntings has changed over the past 100 years,...

Salvage logging following natural disturbances may alter the natural successional trajectories of biological communities by affecting the occurrences of species, functional groups and evolutionary lineages. However, few studies have examined whether dissimilarities between bird communities of salvaged and unsalvaged forests are more pronounced for...

Domestic cats (Felis catus) introduced to insular environments can be invasive predators that often threaten endemic species and cause biodiversity loss or local extinction on the island. This study was conducted from March to July 2018 to understand the population size, home range, and spatial use of cats introduced to Mara Islet (N 33° 07′, E 126...

The book provides different species of birds which are found in western Tanzania. This book is important for both people whom interested in bird watching as well as University students

Elevation often becomes an important component in the breeding site selection of forest birds because it may affect individual fitness. To understand how the threatened fairy pitta (Pitta nympha Temminck & Schlegel) selects a particular elevation for breeding and whether the pitta achieves better reproductive performance in its preferred elevation,...

Migratory birds have evolved diverse migration strategies in response to a variety of factors, but information about the detailed migration patterns of Asian songbirds is not yet available. To understand the short-distance migration pattern of declining Yellow-throated Buntings (Emberiza elegans) in East Asia, we analyzed stable isotopes from the o...

Phenological shifts of plants and animals due to climate change can vary among regions and species, requiring study of local ecosystems to understand specific impacts. The reproductive timing of insectivorous songbirds in temperate forests is tightly synchronized with peak prey abundance, and thus they can be susceptible to such shift in timing. We...

“Oreum” is a local common name for a volcanic cone in Jeju Island, the Republic of Korea. Oreums in the Jeju Eastern Oreum Group (JEOG), located in the eastern mid-mountain region of Jeju, have been threatened by increasing tourism and associated development pressures; however, year-round monitoring activities on their ecological values have rarely...

Color rings have been commonly and widely used in many ecological and ornithological studies in the field, but color ring-induced injury in passerines is poorly documented. In this report, we describe the first case of toe loss caused by a dislocated split Darvic ring in a Pale Thrush (Turdus pallidus) that was recaptured 596 days after its initial...

Migratory birds were captured, examined, banded and then released in accordance with a bird banding protocol of the Bird Research Center, National Park Research Institute, Korea National Park Service, from January-December 2010–2011 on Hong and Heuksan Islands, Jeollanam (Jeonnam) Province, in the Republic of Korea (ROK). Concurrently, ticks were c...

Information on sexual dimorphism helps explain a species' evolution in sexual selection and conservation issues such as sex-specific response in environmental changes. The Barn Swallow (Hirundo rustica) is a well-known sexually dimorphic species in which males have longer tail streamers than females. However, when compared with the European-African...

Sex identification is essential to predict perpetuity of the population in a changing environment. Size and eye fleck patterns are known as indicators of sex identification in oystercatchers in the genus Haematopus. We collected information on biometrics and eye fleck patterns of the near-threatened Kamchatka Oystercatcher Haematopus ostralegus osc...

In October 2017, government delegates from 120 countries will convene at the 12th Conference of the Parties of the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species (the Bonn Convention) in Manila, Philippines (CMS 2017). Importantly, this is the first time the conference is held in Asia, the region with the fewest state parties (Caddell 2005). I...

Logging to “salvage” economic returns from forests affected by natural disturbances has become increasingly prevalent globally. Despite potential negative effects on biodiversity, salvage logging is often conducted, even in areas otherwise excluded from logging and reserved for nature conservation, inter alia because strategic priorities for post‐d...

Commensal breeding habits of the Anthracophora rusticola (Coleoptera: Cetoniidae) in stick nests of carnivorous, piscivorous, and omnivorous birds were recently reported, but the detailed life history of the scarab beetle has not been thoroughly elucidated. To understand the breeding cycle of the declining A. rusticola related to that of nesting Ch...

Chewing lice (Phthiraptera) that parasitize the globally threatened swan goose Anser cygnoides have been long recognized since the early 19th century, but those records were probably biased towards sampling of captive or domestic geese due to the small population size and limited distribution of its wild hosts. To better understand the lice species...

Many birds collide with static and mobile man-made structures whether concealed or conspicuous, raising conservation concerns (Bevanger 1994, Drewitt and Langston 2008, Martin 2011). In certain species, even predatory raptors, such high susceptibility to collision may be caused by relatively poor frontal vision (Bevanger 1994, Martin 2011), but it...

Waterbird survival rates are a key component of demographic modeling used for effective conservation of long-lived threatened species. The Swan Goose (Anser cygnoides) is globally threatened and the most vulnerable goose species endemic to East Asia due to its small and rapidly declining population. To address a current knowledge gap in demographic...

Summary For the first time, we estimated the population sizes of two swan species and four goose species from observations during the non-breeding period in East Asia. Based on combined counts from South Korea, Japan and China, we estimated the total abundance of these species as follows: 42,000–47,000 Whooper Swans Cygnus cygnus ; 99,000–141,000 T...

Agro-ecological conditions associated with the spread and persistence of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) are not well understood, but the trade of live poultry is suspected to be a major pathway. Although market chains of live bird trade have been studied through indirect means including interviews and questionnaires, direct methods have n...

The koilin membrane, formed by the secretions of the ventricular and pyloric glands, functions as a protective layer in the gizzards of most bird species. However, the ecological functions of koilin have never been studied in free-ranging penguins. During the two austral summers from 2012 to 2014, we observed the regurgitated koilins of chinstrap p...

Abstract. The role of structural coloration, which is produced by the optical interactions among micro- and nanostructures in the feather barb or barbules, is still unclear in the context of sexual or social signaling, because the mechanism of color production is complex and the factors affecting it are not fully documented. We investigated whether...

Tick surveillance of migratory birds was conducted during 2009 on Hong Island (Hong-do), Jeonnam Province, Republic of Korea. A total of 16/102 (15.8%) species of birds captured by mist net for banding were infested with ticks. A total of 143 ticks belonging to two genera and seven species—Ixodes turdus (96 ticks), Haemaphysalis flava (17), Haemaph...

The 65th Medical Brigade and Public Health Command District-Korea, in collaboration with the Migratory Bird Research Center, National Park Research Institute, conducted migratory bird tick surveillance at Sogugul and Gaerin Islands (small rocky bird nesting sites), Jeollanam-do (Province), Republic of Korea (ROK), on 30 July and 1 August 2009. Bree...

Populations of several long-distance migratory songbirds in Eurasia are in peril, drastically illustrated by the recent range-wide population collapse in the Yellow-breasted Bunting Emberiza aureola . There are signals of a strong decline also in the Rustic Bunting E. rustica , but no range-wide assessment of population trends in this superabundant...

Paddy rice in monsoon Asia plays an important role in global food security and climate change. Here we documented annual dynamics of paddy rice areas in the northern frontier of Asia, including northeastern (NE) China, North Korea, South Korea, and Japan, from 2000 to 2014 through analysis of satellite images. The paddy rice area has increased by 1...

Shimokoriyama Seiichi (1883-?) was a Japanese zoologist who collected more than 1,980 bird specimens comprised of 318 species between 1908 and 1917 in Korea. He published the ‘Catalogue of Korean Bird Specimens in Li Wong Museum’ in 1918, describing details of the earliest bird collections that had never been taken out of the Korean territory. In 2...

Although the diet of Peregrine Falcons (Falco peregrinus) has been studied worldwide, little information on the species' feeding behavior has been reported for East Asia. To document prey composition and seasonal foraging habits, we collected prey remains and observed hunting behavior of Peregrine Falcons from 2001 to 2013 in the Republic of Korea....

Nutritional condition is an important factor determining the time and performance of breeding in birds. Many different methods to estimate the nutritional conditions of wild birds have been suggested. In this study, we tested a hypothesis that varied tits (Parus varius) under better nutritional conditions lay their first eggs earlier than birds und...

Post-fire restoration can affect breeding bird communities and species compositions over a long-term period by determining post-fire succession, and a long-term monitoring is therefore required to understand its impacts on forest birds. This study aimed to document the effects of post-fire restoration methods on breeding bird communities in three a...

Nowhere are the negative impacts of invasive species, such as ecosystem modification, predation, parasitism, and disease, more apparent than in the Pacific islands, where human contact triggered a massive avian extinction event that is still ongoing. Island bird species are inherently vulnerable to extinction due to their small, isolated population...

The East Asian-Australasian Flyway supports the greatest diversity and populations of migratory birds globally, as well as the highest number of threatened migratory species of any flyway, including passerines (15 species). However it is also one of the most poorly understood migration systems, and little is known about the populations and ecology...

Context: Behavioural responses can be used to understand the impacts of disturbance on animals and to develop management strategies, and there is considerable conservation interest in quantifying the effects of disturbances on wild animals. Aims: We seek to formulate a management plan for the endangered black-faced spoonbills (Platalea minor) in a...

About 90% of the global population of Streaked Shearwaters Calonectris leucomelas breed on islands in the seas around Japan. The species’s status and distribution in Japan is fairly well documented, but for the Korean part of the breeding range, only limited information in Korean language sources exists. The species was first described in Korea in...

Being able to estimate the age of individual nestlings is essential for various raptor studies, monitoring and conservation. The Chinese Sparrowhawk Accipiter soloensis occurs in a wide geographic range throughout East and South Asia as a long-distance migrant, but little information on the growth of nestlings has been recorded. We measured six par...

Anaplasmosis is a rickettsial zoonosis mediated by blood-sucking arthropods, such as ticks, flies, and mosquitos. Migratory birds are common hosts of ticks that are mediators of anaplasmosis, in particular, the tick infection rate in thrushes (family Turdidae) has been known to be high. The main purpose of this study is to survey the occurrence and...

Siberian Roe deer which inhabits Jeju Island is unique native species. Most of all the roe deer infect a lot of ticks, which can affect its population directly and can act as a vector to spread vector-borne diseases. The purposes of this study were to identify the ticks and detect the piroplamsosis on the roe deer in Jeju island. We collected ticks...