Monitoring breeding birds in urban areas was not very popular until Sovon initiated MUS in 2007 (Monitoring Scheme for Urban Species). Nowadays, more than one thousand observers participate in this project, including three hundred women, which is way more than in other bird monitoring projects. Photo Peter Eekelder
The first forty years of the Dutch breeding bird monitoring program
February 24, 2025
In 2023, the Dutch breeding bird monitoring program had been running for 40 years. The program goes back to the beginning of the previous century when it started with counting nests of conspicuous birds like the Grey heron. Although the fieldwork method (territory mapping) has remained essentially the same since its start in 1984, many aspects regarding the management and implementation of the scheme have changed.
Monitoring breeding birds in urban areas was not very popular until Sovon initiated MUS in 2007 (Monitoring Scheme for Urban Species). Nowadays, more than one thousand observers participate in this project, including three hundred women, which is way more than in other bird monitoring projects. Photo Peter Eekelder
In a recently published paper by Chris van Turnhout, Arjan Boele, Jan-Willem Vergeer & Tom van der Meij in Limosa the authors give an overview of the most important developments, key results and future challenges of national bird monitoring. Topics are the extension of monitoring goals (e.g. from common species only to also rare and colonial breeding birds, from national trends only to also regional and site-specific trends), refinements in fieldwork interpretation, implementation and integration of additional subschemes in hitherto underrepresented habitats, participation and facilitation of volunteer observers, trend analyses methods including correction for observer biases, e.g. by implementing a post-hoc stratification and weighting procedure, and the future possibilities of adopting new fieldwork techniques such as drones and automated acoustic monitoring.
(PDF) De eerste 40 jaar van het Broedvogel Monitoring Project [The first forty years of the Dutch breeding bird monitoring program]. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/389039522
Like the Dutch (human) population, the observers of breeding birds are ageing. This could have an effect on breeding birds' trends, which are more challenging to hear when the observer gets older. Analyses showed that only the trends of Long-tailed Tits and Treecreepers might have been affected a little bit by the ageing of the observers. Photo by Květa Skopalová, Flickr ČSO