The Common Raven population increased in most of Europe. The main reason for its recovery is the end of persecution in many countries and reintroduction programmes. The species also profits from anthropogenic food sources in some regions.
Photo by Pavel Štěpánek
What is new in 2024 data update?
December 11, 2024
Collecting data with only a one-year delay has become the golden PECBMS standard. We are grateful to all the national coordinators for their efforts to deliver their data up to 2023.
The Common Raven population increased in most of Europe. The main reason for its recovery is the end of persecution in many countries and reintroduction programmes. The species also profits from anthropogenic food sources in some regions.
Photo by Pavel Štěpánek
We decided to change PECBMS terminology in some terms:
The updated names of the PECBMS indicators align with official CBD (Convention on Biological Diversity) terms used by BirdLife, the European Commission, and national and international policies. We also use the term ‘indicator’, but this applies to all the indicators we present in general.
Wild Bird Indices (so far, Common bird indicators)
All Bird Index (so far, All common birds)
Farmland Bird Index (so far, Common farmland birds)
Forest Bird Index (so far, Common forest birds)
• We produced indices and trends for 170 European wild bird species based on data from 30 countries.
• The number of species published in 2024 remained the same as in the last years.
• All countries delivered their data until 2023, except Germany, which standardly provides data with a two-year delay. Therefore, German data till 2022 was used for this update. We publish the indices in the downloadable tables with standard errors and 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 again used the country population sizes published in BirdLife International (2021): European Red List of Birds to weight national indices and calculate supranational indices and trends.
• The indices might be slightly changed because of the combination of changes in some countries. The United Kingdom has significantly revised its dataset, which has influenced the index of some species and even caused mild changes in the wild bird indices (indicators). New data was added to the French and Finnish datasets. The Netherlands prolonged the time series for some species. However, the indices and indicators are generally consistent with the outputs published in the previous year.
• The EU Wild Bird Index without the United Kingdom has been published since the 2022 update. The ‘EU Wild Bird Index with UK’ is no longer calculated or published. As usual, the UK appears in all European species’ indices and non-EU indicators.
• As usual, two species (Oenanthe cypriaca and Curruca melanothorax) haven’t been included in the PECBMS Wild Bird Indices (indicators) for Europe and the EU, as they are endemic species for Cyprus. Consequently, only 168 species are included in the indicators. The number of species included in the PECBMS Farmland and Forest Bird Indices for Europe and the EU remained unchanged (39 farmland species and 34 forest species).
• The majority of national coordinators use an updated version of a tool called RTRIM-shell to calculate national indices (developed in Statistics Netherlands). The tool uses the RTRIM package in R to produce the same outputs as in the previous updates of the indicators.
• The R-based tool for calculating European indices (RSWAN) is now used regularly.
• We used the MSI tool to calculate supranational species indices (developed in Statistics Netherlands).
Besides this, the computation procedure, data quality control, and presented indices, trends, and indicators are generally consistent with the update for 2023. All the inconsistencies are justified by changes in national data and new population sizes used by the PECBMS.