The 1st International Symposium on Wolverine Research and Management was held during 13-15 June 2005 in Jokkmokk, Sweden, and was attended by more than 160 researchers, managers and stakeholders from Sweden, Norway, Finland, Russia, China, USA, Canada, Italy, England, The Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany.
The overarching aim of the Symposium was to provide a much needed forum for researchers, managers and stakeholders, to share contemporary scientific information on wolverine ecology, behaviour and management.
Information was presented as 49 oral presentations and 20 posters from eight different countries. These presentations covered a wide range of topics within the following sessions: status and distribution, monitoring methods, research methods, behavioural ecology and demography, feeding and community ecology, habitat, management and conservation, management and human dimensions, and harvest and development impacts on wolverines. Abstracts of oral and poster presentations of the Symposium are available at the Wildlife Biology website and can be found at http://www.wildlifebiology.com.
As a result of the symposium, 16 manuscripts were submitted for possible publication in this special supplementary issue of Wildlife Biology. We selected 15 papers for peer review. All papers submitted were critically reviewed by at least two scientists, of whom many had not participated in the Symposium. In the editing of these papers we used the same criteria and standards as are used for manuscripts ordinarily submitted to Wildlife Biology. The referees' recommendations helped the authors improve their manuscripts and were of great help to the Wildlife Biology Editor-in-Chief, Anne Loison, me and my fellow Associate Editors Dr. Petter Kjellander and Dr. Fredrik Dalerum, when deciding which papers to include in this special issue of Wildlife Biology. On the basis of the referees' comments, we accepted nine papers. We sincerely thank all the referees who contributed their valuable time to the reviewing process.
I hope you will find this special supplementary issue of Wildlife Biology as interesting and educational as I do. This issue would not have been printed without the funding provided by the Norwegian Directorate for Nature Management. I also would like to express my gratitude to Petter Kjellander and Fredrik Dalerum, Anne Loison, Jan Bertelsen, technical Editor and Jon Swenson, the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Wildlife Biology for their excellent collaboration.
Finally, I wish to take the opportunity to thank my fellow organisers of the 1st International Symposium on Wolverine Research and Management; Camilla Wikenros, Audrey Magoun, Justina Ray, Roel May and the symposium funders: the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, the Norwegian Directorate for Nature Management, WWF Sweden, the Research Council of Norway, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Wolverine Foundation Inc., National Park Service (USA), and the Ontario Living Legacy Trust.
