What is new in 2022 data update?

2022 Update Summary

• A new country, Andorra, joined the PECBMS. Hence, we produced indices and trends for 170 common European species based on data from 30 countries.
• The number of species published in 2022 remained the same as in the last years.
• Almost all countries delivered their data up to 2021, except Germany and Portugal, which provided data up to 2020.
• Indices of France, which were not updated for a couple of years, are actualised to 2021.
• We publish the indices and indicators in freely downloadable tables with standard errors next to the confidence limits. The reason is to provide standard errors for the researchers who prefer to use them. Of course, confidence limits must be corrected if their value should be negative, but standard errors need no corrections.
• We used the updated country population sizes published in the European Red List of Birds (BirdLife International 2021) for weighting national indices while calculating supranational indices and trends.
• The indices might have changed because of revised data in some countries. For example, French data has undergone thorough data revision, and the dataset has been enlarged with new data from the Côte d´Azur and other regions. Denmark and Romania revised the start years of all the species.
• All the abovementioned changes might have caused some changes on both national and supranational levels and always have to be carefully explained.
• Despite all these changes, the overall consistency of European indices and indicators remained very well.
• The biggest differences in indices and indicators compared to the former update appear in EU farmland species indices and indicator. Due to Brexit in February 2020, we calculated all EU bird indicators by excluding data from the United Kingdom. We follow EUROSTAT procedure, hence we removed the UK data from the whole time series to create the indicators without the country that is no longer considered a part of the EU. EU indicator calculation without the UK was done for the first time in 2022 update (the 2021 update was based on data until 2019 when the UK was still an EU Member State). It is possible to compare the ‘EU indicator without the UK’ and ‘EU indicator with the UK’ in one graph on the PECBMS webpage.
  As a result of UK data removal, all the EU bird indicators have changed (compared to the previous updates of EU indicators that have included the UK data). The most visible change (8% difference between the ´EU without the UK´ and ´EU with the EU´ indicators) happened in Farmland indicator.
  UK appears in all other indices and indicators as usual. UK disposes the longest time series in Europe. Moreover, UK is also a country with first detections of bird loss in Europe and fastest population decline. Therefore, the change of Farmland bird indicator in EU does not mean that EU birds are doing better now. It instead shows the importance of the countries with long time series of monitoring data for realistic European indicators.
• As usual, two species (Oenanthe cypriaca and Sylvia melanothorax) haven’t been included in the common bird indicators for Europe and the EU, as they are endemic species for Cyprus. Consequently, 168 species are included in common bird indicators. The number of species included in common farmland and common forest bird indicators for Europe and the EU remained unchanged (39 farmland species and 34 forest species).
• Majority of national coordinators use an updated tool version to calculate national indices (developed by Statistics Netherlands) called RTRIM shell. The tool uses the RTRIM package in R to produce the same outputs as in the previous updates of the indicators. RTRIM shell was needed because we started using a new R tool for supranational index calculation. Moreover, this new tool replaced the old TRIM/BirdStats programme, which became outdated in some processes. Therefore, we plan to use explicitly the RTRIM shell soon.
• The R-based tool for calculating European indices (RSWAN) is now used regularly.
• We used the MSI tool to calculate supranational species indices (developed by Statistics Netherlands).
• We improved the online tool for national and supranational data checks. National coordinators can also use it for their data checks.

Besides this, the computation procedure, data quality control and presented indices, trends and indicators are generally consistent with the 2021 update. All the inconsistencies are justified by changes in national data and new population sizes used by the PECBMS.