Science-based adaptive harvest management delivers population recovery in the European Turtle Dove

The European turtle dove (Streptopelia turtur) is globally threatened but is also a quarry species in many countries. Following significant and sustained population declines across Europe, an International Species Action Plan was adopted in 2018. It included the recommendation to regulate its hunting through an adaptive harvest management mechanism, established in 2020 and overviewed by the European Commission. A consortium of research agencies led by the Institute of Game and Wildlife Research (IREC), part of the Spanish National Research Council CSIC, provides scientific advice and makes technical recommendations for managing the species on a flyway scale.

The scientific team developed a population model and built alternative scenarios to return to population growth in this declining species. All pointed to a likely recovery if hunting was suspended temporarily; such a drastic measure would allow time to implement new measures that could guarantee the sustainability of any future exploitation. The scientists drew on those conclusions to recommend a continental-scale hunting ban, which was established in 2021 and has been in place until now.

A paper recently published in the influential scientific journal Conservation Letters shows the population response in terms of breeding numbers in 2022 and 2023 after the first two seasons of the moratorium[1]. Data compiled and analysed by the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS) show that the continued turtle dove decline in the western flyway reached an all-time low of 1.56 million breeding pairs in the spring of 2021. But then, following the establishment of the hunting ban, numbers started to rise again to 1.96 million pairs, an increase of 400 thousand breeding pairs, or 25 %, in only two years (2023).

The study also signifies that the management decisions taken in the neighbouring central-eastern flyway were not so strict initially because the observed decline was less steep. They only reduced hunting efforts (instead of a complete ban) over the same period. As a result, numbers in that flyway continued to decline to a historic low of 0.56 million pairs in 2023, down by 15 % since 2021.

The rapid population response to the total ban in the western flyway, combined with the lack of reaction to the partial reduction in the central-eastern flyway, confirms that the temporary moratorium was the appropriate management decision in the short term. Data from Spain indicate that the moratorium coincided with two consecutive seasons of poor breeding success due to extremely dry and hot weather. However, since the suspension of hunting, individual survival has increased and is the likely driver of the recovery.

In the long term, it may be possible to resume hunting in the framework of adaptive harvest management, provided that a number of conditions are met. Any return of hunting will have to be done sustainably, and it will necessarily be underpinned by science, as breeding populations will continue to be carefully monitored across Europe by the PECBMS project. Let’s hope that further positive results follow. The EBCC put a lot of effort into improving monitoring in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, where at least 80 plots were surveyed by standardised method in 2024 in Western Balkans and Moldova. Therefore, hopefully, there will be better data from the eastern flyway soon.

The new article highlights the importance of this empirical example of successful management of a threatened quarry species achieved through informed decision-making based on sound science. The Adaptive Harvest Management mechanism put in place for this species is the first of its kind implemented at large scale for a landbird in Europe, and it marks the path for the management of comparable species in the context of the European Union. This example shows the potential for the combined cooperation between policy and science; the same approach is now being applied, through a contract with the European Commission, led by IREC, to other huntable species with non-secure status in the EU.

The article by Carles Carboneras, Eva Šilarová, Jana Škorpilová and Beatriz Arroyo (2024) “Rapid population response to a hunting ban in a previously overharvested, threatened landbird”, is available in Early View with Open Access at Conservation Letters https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/conl.13057.

[1] Notice that the spring breeding seasons of 2022 and 2023 follow the autumn hunting seasons of 2021 and 2022, respectively.