Archive of IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group status and meeting reports back to 1965

The IUCN/SCC Polar Bear Specialist Group have recently modernized their website, which apparently required them to remove all meeting reports and status documents going back to 1968. Since I had downloaded all of them for my own research, I have archived them here for anyone wishing to assess the accuracy of statements made by PGSG members about what they did or said in the past, or to understand the history of the organization. I did something similar a few years ago regarding the administrative reports used in 2007 to support the decision to list polar bears as ‘threatened’ under the US Endangered Species Act (ESA), which disappeared from the US Geological Survey website: they can now be found here.

Summary of IUCN/SSC PBSG proceedings of meetings and status documents

1965    Conference      Fairbanks, Alaska (Anonymous, 1966)*pre-PBSG

1968    1st Meeting     Morges, Switzerland (Anonymous, 1968) *summary only

1970    2nd Meeting    Morges, Switzerland (Anonymous 1970)*includes 1968 summary

1972    3rd Meeting    Morges, Switzerland (Anonymous 1972)

1973?  4th Meeting     location unknown, for drafting convention on protection [no copy]

1974    5th Meeting     St. Prex, Switzerland (Anonymous 1976)

1976    6th Meeting     Morges, Switzerland (Anonymous 1980) *combined issue

1979    7th Meeting     Copenhagen, Denmark (Anonymous 1980) *combined issue

1981     8th Meeting    Oslo, Norway (Anonymous 1985)

1985    9th Meeting     Edmonton, Canada (Anonymous 1986)

1988   10th Meeting    Sochi, USSR (Amstrup and Wiig 1991)

1993   11th Meeting    Copenhagen, Denmark (Wiig et al. 1995)

1997   12th Meeting    Oslo, Norway (Derocher et al. 1998)

2001   13th Meeting    Nuuk, Greenland (Lunn et al. 2002)

2005   14th Meeting    Seattle, Washington (Aars et al. 2006)

2009   15th Meeting    Copenhagen, Denmark (Obbard et al. 2010)

2012    16th Meeting   Oslo, Norway (Anonymous 2012)

2014    17th Meeting   Fort Collins, USA (Anonymous 2014), status docs online only

2016   18th Meeting    Anchorage, Alaska (Durner et al. 2018)

2017 Status update (available online only)

2019                            Status update (July, published in September)

2021     virtual             Status update (July, published in December)

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Archive

NOTE: The documents are listed in order from oldest to newest. For some years there are multiple documents.

Anonymous 1966. Polar Bears: Proceedings of the First International Scientific Conference on the Polar Bear, Fairbanks, Alaska, 6-10 September 1965. US Dept. of Interior. 72 pg.  https://books.google.ca/books/about/Proceedings_of_the_First_International_S.html?id=-FFUzgEACAAJ&redir_esc=y Excerpt copy below.

Anonymous 1968. IUCN/Polar Bear Specialist Group 1st meeting. IUCN Bulletin 2(7):54-56. Also included in Anonymous 1970 as an appendix, see next entry below.

Anonymous 1970. Polar Bears: Proceedings of the 2nd working meeting of the Polar Bear Specialists Group IUCN/SSC, 2-4 February 1970, Morges, Switzerland. Morges, Switzerland. [with 1968 meeting in appendix]

Anonymous 1972. Polar Bears: Proceedings of the 3rd working meeting of the Polar Bear Specialists Group IUCN/SSC, 7-10 February 1972, Morges, Switzerland. Morges, Switzerland.

Anonymous 1976. Polar Bears: Proceedings of the 5th working meeting of the Polar Bear Specialists Group IUCN/SSC, 2-4 February 1974, St. Prex, Switzerland. Morges, Switzerland.

Anonymous 1980. Polar Bears: Proceedings of the 6th working meeting of the Polar Bear Specialists Group IUCN/SSC, 7-10 December 1976, Morges, Switzerland and Proceedings of the 7th meeting of the Polar Bear Specialists Group IUCN/SSC, 30 January -1 February 1979, Copenhagen, Denmark. Gland, Switzerland.

Anonymous. 1985. Polar Bears: Proceedings of the 8th working meeting of the Polar Bear Specialists Group IUCN/SSC, 15-19 January 1981, Oslo, Norway. Gland, Switzerland and Cambridge UK, IUCN.

Anonymous. 1986. Polar Bears: Proceedings of the 9th working meeting of the Polar Bear Specialists Group IUCN/SSC, 9-11 August 1985, Edmonton, Canada. Gland, Switzerland and Cambridge UK, IUCN.

Amstrup, S.C. and Wiig, O. (eds.) 1991. Polar Bears: Proceedings of the 10th working meeting of the Polar Bear Specialists Group IUCN/SSC, Oct. 25-29 1988, Sochi, USSR. Gland, Switzerland and Cambridge UK, IUCN.

Wiig, Ø., Born, E.W., and Garner, G.W. (eds.) 1995. Polar Bears: Proceedings of the 11th working meeting of the IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialists Group, 25-27 January 1993, Copenhagen, Denmark. Gland, Switzerland and Cambridge UK, IUCN.

Derocher, A., Garner, G.W., Lunn, N.J., and Wiig, Ø. (eds.) 1998. Polar Bears: Proceedings of the 12th meeting of the Polar Bear Specialists Group IUCN/SSC, 3-7 February 1997, Oslo, Norway. Gland, Switzerland and Cambridge UK, IUCN.

Lunn, N.J., Schliebe, S., and Born, E.W. (eds.). 2002. Polar Bears: Proceedings of the 13th working meeting of the IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialists Group, 23-28 June , 2001, Nuuk, Greenland. Gland, Switzerland and Cambridge UK, IUCN.

Aars, J., Lunn, N. J. and Derocher, A.E. (eds.) 2006. Polar Bears: Proceedings of the 14th Working Meeting of the IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group, 20-24 June 2005, Seattle, Washington, USA. Occasional Paper of the IUCN Species Survival Commission 32. IUCN, Gland (Switzerland) and Cambridge (UK).

Obbard, M.E., Theimann, G.W., Peacock, E. and DeBryn, T.D. (eds.) 2010. Polar Bears: Proceedings of the 15th meeting of the Polar Bear Specialists Group IUCN/SSC, 29 June-3 July, 2009, Copenhagen, Denmark. Gland, Switzerland and Cambridge UK, IUCN.

Anonymous 2012. Report of the extraordinary meeting of the IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group, 24-27 October 2012. Outcome document posted online.

Anonymous 2014. Meeting participants overview for the 17th meeting of the PBSG, Fort Collins, USA, 9-14 June 2014. Document posted online.

Anonymous 2014. Terms of Reference from the 17th meeting of the PBSG, Fort Collins, USA, 9-14 June 2014. Document posted online.

Anonymous 2014. Minutes of the 17th meeting of the PBSG, Fort Collins, USA, 9-14 June 2014. Document posted online.

Anonymous 2014. Status table prior to the 17th meeting of the PBSG, Fort Collins, USA, 9-14 June 2014. Document posted online, dated 2010, screencap taken 31 January 2014.

Durner, G.M., Laidre, K.L, and York, G.S. (eds). 2018. Polar Bears: Proceedings of the 18th Working Meeting of the IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group, 7–11 June 2016, Anchorage, Alaska. Gland, Switzerland and Cambridge, UK, IUCN.

Anonymous 2017. Status table update, 30 March 2017. Data posted online, pdf screencap here.

Anonymous. 2019. Status Report on the World’s Polar Bear Subpopulations, IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group, July 2019.

Anonymous. 2019. Status Table Polar Bear Subpopulations, IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group, posted online 20 September 2019.

Anonymous. 2021. Status Report on the World’s Polar Bear Subpopulations, IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group, July 2021. Currently available here, pdf backup copy below.