March 4, 2022
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.
March 1, 2022
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.
February 28, 2022
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.
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.
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.
January 3, 2022
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
