Migratory birds are declining globally because of the way that humans have modified the landscape over recent decades – according to new research from the University of East Anglia, the University of Porto and the University of Lisbon (both Portugal) and the Czech Society for Ornithology (Czech Republic). A new study, which was based also on the PECBMS data, reveals that population declines have been greatest among species that migrate to areas with more human infrastructure - roads, buildings, power lines, wind turbines - and higher population densities and hunting levels. Habitat degradation and climate change have also played a part in driving long-term declines.
SEO/BirdLife has developed two free mobile applications to train the ability to identify birds' songs and count large numbers of birds. Both skills are essential for volunteers collaborating in bird monitoring programs and censuses. It is available in English so that more people can use it.
This year, the Society for the Birds and Nature Protection carries out the Common Bird Monitoring Scheme program in Moldova. The scheme started in 2021 as a pilot project. Still, in 2022 the Moldovan ornithologists are financially supported by the EBCC and PECMBS via the „International Census Plots” project, which aims to boost common bird monitoring schemes in Eastern Europe.
In spring, a new breeding bird report looking back at season 2020 was published. The report summarises the main results of the national Breeding Bird Monitoring Network in 2020, organised by Sovon Vogelonderzoek Nederland in collaboration with Statistics Netherlands (CBS, responsible for quality assurance). The publication, including an English summary, is available for download.
We sincerely invite you to Lucerne to join the PECBMS workshop. You will hear about the project progress since the last Bird Numbers conference in Evora in 2019, the individual scheme news and presentations on some research outputs and future developments.
On Tuesday 1 March, the second PECBMS webinar took place on Zoom. Since the new data request is nearing, we organized the webinar on RTRIM-shell and related topics. We guided the national coordinators from the data preparation to data validation in the online tool. Moreover, Anna Gamero introduced the new site-level data online tool which will be accessible to all the coordinators very soon.
In February, scientists from the University of East Anglia in collaboration with the PECBMS network published new research on species’ habitat association in Ecological Indicators. They explored the ‘relative habitat use’ (RHU) metric as a means of quantifying species’ habitat association and degree of specialization. The authors recommend the RHU metric as a useful tool in conservation management strategies to protect habitat specialists and their habitats, and thus support national and international progress towards reaching biodiversity targets.
BirdLife Cyprus is looking for one or two volunteers who may be able to contribute their time and energy to bird conservation in Cyprus this spring. Experienced birders are needed to visit the island as full-time volunteer bird surveyors, to help with the monitoring of breeding bird species during the period from April to June.
We have made many innovations to our tools and dataset in this period, which led to improved supranational species indices and indicators, speeded up the process of data gathering, data control and calculations. In the 2021 update released on 6 December, we included two new monitoring schemes' data from Croatia and Flanders, so the outputs are based on data covering 40 years from 29 countries including 26 EU MS – all but Malta, where no regular bird monitoring scheme is running. We updated the network with regular newsletters and web articles. The PECBMS data was used in two scientific papers published in respected peer-reviewed journals. We contacted all EU MS coordinators and agreed on national indicators delivery for policy purposes via PECBMS. Moreover, we gathered all national farmland bird indicators produced so far and the species lists behind them. We met EU stakeholders several times and provided answers and advice upon request. Finally, we attended EBCC Board meeting and presented the progress of the PECBMS.
On 16 December 2021, Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development published a report on the implementation of the common monitoring and evaluation framework, including an assessment of the performance of the common agricultural policy 2014–2020. There are several surprising statements, which the PECBMS representatives find unsupported by evidence and potentially harmful to the scheme as well as to the tens of renowned researchers and thousands of volunteers involved in the scheme. Therefore we felt obliged to object publicly to the statement and ask for clarification and apology. We publish the open letter here.
