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.
Population trends for 107 common bird species in Czechia for the period 1982–2021 were published online. Read a short report on the Czech breeding bird survey.
On 2 December, the Third Catalan Breeding Bird Atlas was presented, a project promoted by the Catalan Ornithological Institute (ICO) that takes a detailed picture of all the bird species nesting in Catalonia. In a 639-page book published by the publisher Cossetània, you can find for each species the distribution, the population estimate and the population trend for the last forty years.
From April 2020 till October 2021, we ran a thorough data revision. We have made many improvements to our tools and dataset in this period, which led to improved supranational species indices and indicators. We are happy to announce that the process of data gathering, data control and calculations improved enormously.
This report presents updated population trends and indices of 170 common European bird species for the time period 1980–2019 that have been produced by the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS) in 2021. The species trends presented are for a long time period (from 1980 onwards until 2019) and for the last ten years (2010–2019).
The Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS) presents a set of updated European wild bird indicators covering 1980–2019. The outputs based on the data for 168 common bird species come from 29 countries since we included data from Croatia for the first time. In addition, we conducted an extensive data quality check and tested new R software versions. We wish to thank all the national coordinators for their efforts to cope with the new programmes, and to the thousands of volunteers counting birds in the field.
In 2014, BirdLife Hungary (MME) started the MAP (Madár Atlasz Program) program to ensure the requirement of data gathering for the second European Breeding Bird Atlas (EBBA2). We aimed to collect data for preparing the first Hungarian Bird Atlas that summarizes all available knowledge about the population, distribution, population dynamics and conservation status of 420 bird species that occurred naturally in Hungary until 2019. As a result, we published the Bird Atlas of Hungary at the end of September 2021.
One of the teams coordinating the EBBA2 project was based at the Czech Society for Ornithology (CSO). Petr Voříšek, Marina Kipson, Martin Kupka, Jana Škorpilová and Alena Klvaňová were responsible for network coordination, communication, project management support and artwork coordination. On 6 November, the team was awarded the CSO Award for a considerable contribution to the coordination of EBBA2, a milestone in European ornithology. Congratulations!
A new study on breeding birds in the EU shows one out of every six birds over nearly 40 years has been lost. Overall, we have lost around 600 million breeding birds in the EU since 1980. Scientists comprising a team of European collaborators from RSPB, BirdLife International and the Czech Society for Ornithology analysed data for 378 out of 445 bird species native to countries in the EU.
Natural sounds, and bird songs, in particular, play a key role in building and maintaining our connection with nature – but a major new study published on 2 November in Nature Communications reveals that the sounds of spring are changing, with dawn choruses across North America and Europe becoming quieter and less varied.
