Awards include best authored and edited books as well as journal articles
The winners of TWS’ 2025 publication awards include information about population biology, wildlife disease and health, American woodcock life history, using mathematical models to gain insights on biological phenomena and more.
Here are the publications and authors that took this year’s prizes.
John Vucetich won the award for authored book for his publication The Biology and Conservation of Animal Populations. Vucetich’s textbook approaches the complex mathematics of population biology through practical examples and case studies.
Richard Sale and Steve Watson took home the honorable mention for this category for their book, The Peregrine Falcon.
David Jessup and Robin Radcliffe earned the best edited book award for their book, Wildlife Disease and Health in Conservation. This publication combines theory and practice to explore the origins and impacts of the wildlife diseases that are most pressing today. The book covers wildlife diseases from a diversity of taxa and the social, legal, financial and political factors that influence how conservation and public health strategies are approached.
Slezak et al. earned the award for best journal paper for their article, Unconventional life history in a migratory shorebird: desegregating reproduction and migration. In this paper, the team documented the first-ever direct evidence of ‘itinerant breeding’ in a migratory bird, the American woodcock (Scolopax minor). Based on GPS tracking of more than 200 female American woodcocks, they found that more than 80% nested more than once—up to six times.
For this category, the runner-up was Must we lose our biological connection to nature to endure changing times? by Joel Berger, Vernon Bleich and R Terry Bowyer.
The article, Using piecewise regression to identify biological phenomena, earned David Wolfson, David Andersen and John Fieberg the best student paper award. In this paper, the authors demonstrate how piecewise regression can be used to identify the presence and timing of different events in wildlife, including the behavior of trumpeter swans (Cygnus buccinator) and pregnant moose (Alces alces) as well as the spike in heart rate of a black bear (Ursus americanus).
The honorable mention for best student paper was awarded to Kristin Engebretsen, Clark Rushing, Darren DeBloois and Julie Young for their paper Increased maternal care improves neonate survival in a solitary carnivore.
