In a science blog post Prof. Richard Gregory, Head of Species Monitoring and Research, RSPB Centre for Conservation Science and Centre for Biodiversity & Environment Research, University College London, discusses recently published research by Juan Traba and Manuel B. Morales in Scientific Reports on the decline of steppe bird species and the loss of fallow land due to agriculture intensification.
This report summarizes the activities of the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS) between January 2019 and June 2019 under the European Commission grant “Towards the new generation of Wild Birds Indicators”.
On 11–12th March, a mini-workshop dedicated to wild bird indicators took place in Solsona, Spain. The Forest Science and Technology Centre of Catalonia (CTFC) hosted more than 20 experts in bird monitoring thanks kind invitation from Lluís Brotons.
In March we have produced a new leaflet presenting the trends of 170 common European bird species based on data from 28 countries covering 37 years (1980–2016). The leaflet summarises outputs of this 2018 data update and presents a nice example of the use of bird monitoring and atlasing in species conservation. PECBMS and EBBA2 data on the European Turtle-dove helped to identify Priority Intervention Areas for this species.
The 21st Conference of the European Bird Census Council (EBCC) called Bird Numbers 2019 ‘Counting birds counts’ will take place in Évora, Portugal on 8-13 April 2019. You are welcome to attend the conference as well as the PECBMS workshop. The programme is already available online and you may download the agenda of the workshop, too.
European common bird indicators produced by the PECBMS were used in the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) report: The State of the World’s Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture.
The number of species published and the countries contributing to the PECBMS in 2018 remained the same as the last year. However, some news in data presentation appeared as species indices are presented in graphs including their lower and upper confidence limits for the time periods from 1980 onwards.
This report presents updated population trends and indices of 170 common European bird species for the time period 1980-2016 that have been produced by the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS) in 2018. The species trends presented are for a long time period (from 1980 onwards until 2016) and for the last ten years (2007-2016).