The Far East taiga forest unrecognized inhospitable terrain for migrating Arctic-nesting waterbirds

　　Wang, X., Cao, L., Bysykatova, I., Xu, Z., Rozenfeld, S., Jeong, W., Vangeluwe, D., Zhao, Y., Xie, T., Yi, K. and Fox, A.D., 2018. The Far East taiga forest: unrecognized inhospitable terrain for migrating Arctic-nesting waterbirds?. PeerJ, 6, p.e4353. (小天鹅，豆雁，白额雁，白鹤，HQXS BP3527, HQXS HQNN)
　　The degree of inhospitable terrain encountered by migrating birds can dramatically affect migration strategies and their evolution as well as influence the way we develop our contemporary flyway conservation responses to protect them. We used telemetry data from 44 tagged individuals of four large-bodied, Arctic breeding waterbird species (two geese, a swan and one crane species) to show for the first time that these birds fly non-stop over the Far East taiga forest, despite their differing ecologies and migration routes. This implies a lack of suitable taiga refuelling habitats for these long-distance migrants. These results underline the extreme importance of northeast China spring staging habitats and of Arctic areas prior to departure in autumn to enable birds to clear this inhospitable biome, confir