News

Report on the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme, December 2021

January 12, 2022

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.

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Response to the Report from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council

January 11, 2022

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.

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The Third Catalan Breeding Bird Atlas was published

December 7, 2021

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.

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What is new in 2021 data update?

December 6, 2021

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.

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Trends of common birds in Europe, 2021 update

December 6, 2021

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).

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European common bird indicators, 2021 update

December 5, 2021

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.

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Bird Atlas of Hungary published

December 2, 2021

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.

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EBBA2 project team from Prague awarded

December 1, 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!

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