The year 2020 marked the 30^th anniversary of Partners In Flight (PIF), an international partnership of over 150 organizations, including federal, provincial, and state government agencies and organizations,  non-government organizations, academic researchers, and industry dedicated to bird conservation. PIF’s mission is to keep common birds common and to advance conservation for species at risk through voluntary partnerships. The year 2020 also marked the anniversary of PIF’s longest-running sub-committee, the International Science Committee, whose members have met regularly for three decades to address priority research needs for bird conservation. Only months before this anniversary, a ground-breaking paper documenting widespread declines in avian species across nearly all guilds and biomes, Decline of the North American Avifauna (Rosenberg et al. 2019), appeared in the journal Science. The publication, whose co-authors included several PIF International Science Committee members and was accompanied by a widespread public awareness campaign, sparked a renewed interest in bird conservation and recognition that the loss of bird biodiversity is part of the global biodiversity and climate crises.

In honor of PIF’s 30^th anniversary, the PIF International Science Committee wanted to celebrate PIF’s many achievements while recognizing that there is much more work to do to conserve landbirds and the ecosystems that support them.  Thus, the committee decided to update a previous PIF publication, Blancher et al. (2006), to re-examine how migratory birds link geographies across the Western Hemisphere and to re-energize and build new cross-boundary partnerships for bird conservation.

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