November 16, 2021
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.
November 3, 2021
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.
October 26, 2021
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.
September 24, 2021
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.
August 5, 2021
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.
June 18, 2021
This report summarises the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS) activities between 15 December 2020 and 15 June 2021.
April 2, 2021
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.
March 26, 2021
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.
March 15, 2021
We are pleased to invite you to the 22nd Conference of the European Bird Census Council (EBCC) called Bird Numbers 2022: “Beyond the Atlas: challenges and opportunities”. The conference will be held from 4 to 8 April 2022 in the city of Lucerne, Switzerland, at the Swiss Museum of Transport (“Verkehrshaus der Schweiz”) next to Lake Lucerne. Mid-conference excursions are planned to various locations in the region. The conference will be organised by the Swiss Ornithological Institute in Sempach.
January 14, 2021
The new report published by Forest Europe informs on the state of European common forest birds by presenting the PECBMS Common forest bird species indicator.
