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.
The year 2021 has become a pilot year of common bird monitoring in Serbia under a new EBCC project called International Census Plots. A total of 27 fieldworkers joined the project and counted birds twice in the breeding season at 34 census plots. Let´s hope this is the start of the new regular long-term common bird monitoring programme in an area, which is rather poorly covered by monitoring, so far.
The Bird Numbers 2022 “Beyond the Atlas: challenges and opportunities” conference, organised by the Swiss Ornithological Institute in Sempach, will be held from 4th to 8th April 2022 in Lucerne, Switzerland.
The Sacre program (Common bird monitoring in Spain) was launched in 1996, thanks to the support of the Royal Society for The Protection of Birds (RSPB). SEO/BirdLife Scientific Committee established the methodology of the survey stations that was the same used in most European countries.
On 30 March the first PECBMS webinar took place. Over 30 participants joined the event dedicated to the RTRIM shell. We discussed the data preparation, most common errors and how to use the Online tool. We also introduced a new forum in Slack to share experience within the whole network.
On 26 March 2021, the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS) network, comprising sixty-six European scientists, published a landmark paper describing the methods, outputs and their use in research and conservation in Scientific Data. This leading open data journal is a part of the Nature family of journals. Alongside the paper, Long-term and large-scale multispecies dataset tracking population changes of common European breeding birds, the database containing supra-national and national population indices of 170 bird species from 28 countries are made publicly available. We believe that the publication will encourage further studies using this unique and powerful dataset based on decades of bird monitoring by thousands of skilled volunteer fieldworkers. Finally, this paper will help to inform and guide conservation science in Europe.
