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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Ornithologists have published a new version of the European Bird Indicators today, showing that we have lost 19% of common bird species since 1980. Particularly alarming is the 61% decline in farmland birds, which are disappearing from the European landscape due to intensification in agriculture. One of the hopes that bird populations will be able to recover in the future is the forthcoming EU Nature restoration regulation.
Since 2022, we do our best to collect data with only one-year delay. We are grateful to all the national coordinators for their effort to deliver their data up to 2022 for the 2023 update.
The Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS) presents a set of updated European common bird indicators covering the period of 1980–2022. The outputs based on the data for 168 common bird species come from 30 countries. We thank all the national coordinators for their efforts to cope with the new programs and the thousands of volunteers counting birds in the field.
This report presents updated population trends and indices of 170 common European bird species for the period 1980–2022 produced by the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS) in 2023. The species trends presented are for an extended period (from 1980 onwards until 2021) and the last ten years (2013–2022).
