October 24, 2024
The recommendation to suspend hunting temporarily from 2021, made by an international consortium of scientists led by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), has allowed a rapid population recovery in this threatened species.
September 19, 2024
The project, funded by the EC, focuses on developing bird indicators for the EU, improving data collection and analysis, and contributing to bird conservation efforts, including the protection of the Turtle Dove and the development of novel indices like the Urban or Mountain Bird Index.
September 9, 2024
The intensity of agriculture in seven countries that entered the EU in 2004 and 2007 increased after the accession. Population trends of farmland birds started to decline, and the population levels reached lower levels than before the accession. The paper suggests that the adverse impacts of agricultural intensification overrode the possible benefits of EU policy measures aimed at supporting biodiversity.
September 6, 2024
Nowadays, most ornithologists have their smartphones close at hand. With that fact in mind, DOF/BirdLife Denmark has now developed an app that can be downloaded and used to enter the birds you see and hear at a point count while in the field. In other words, there is no homework waiting to submit or enter one's observations; it's all done straight out there, so to speak.
August 13, 2024
The first surveys under the International Census Plots scheme in Bosnia and Herzegovina were organised in spring 2024. Four fieldworkers conducted bird counts twice during the breeding season across seven designated census plots. This marked the beginning of establishing a long-term monitoring program to fill the current gaps in bird population data collection in the area, as new observers are currently being trained in bird identification and methodology courses.
June 14, 2024
Urban ecology is a widely studied phenomenon, particularly in the last few decades. Following plants, birds are the second most studied taxa in urban ecology research due to their omnipresence and easy detection in the field. Surprisingly, despite extensive knowledge of urban birds' breeding biology, physiology, and community ecology, their population dynamics have been highly understudied. In the present study, published earlier this year in Ecological Indicators, the authors aimed to test which ecological traits influence the national trends of 95 bird species that frequently breed in urban areas of 18 European countries, using data from the Pan European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS).
June 14, 2024
The European Turtle Dove (Streptopelia turtur) breeding numbers show an overall decline, and the species was classified as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. The main threats are illegal hunting and trapping, unsustainable hunting levels, habitat loss and intensive agriculture. Therefore, the European Commission induced an International single species action plan for Turtle Dove protection. The PECBMS task within this plan is to impute Turtle Dove flyway-specific indices. Still, the data is also used to create models predicting the population's future development under various conditions.
May 15, 2024
The publication of the European Breeding Bird Atlas 2 (EBBA2) represented a milestone for European ornithology. Developing a European atlas takes time, and 30 years elapsed between EBBA1 and EBBA2. Updating data on species’ distributions on a more frequent basis and ensuring that they are harmonised across Europe could complement the role of atlases. The European Bird Census Council (EBCC) has started the project EBBA Live, which attempts to fill in this gap of information for as many species as possible. This ambitious project has started with a pilot project on farmland birds, which is called EBBA Live Farmland.
April 25, 2024
The 4th PECBMS Webinar was held on 7th March 2024, and 44 participants attended the Zoom online event. It has already been a tradition to introduce news and highlights in the tools and data delivery in PECBMS. This time, we introduced three topics: RTRIM-shell, the Online tool part for national data provision and site-level data. The recording is available in Slack.
March 29, 2024
This report summarises the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS) activities between 1 September 2023 and 15 March 2024.
