EBCC Newsletter

Autumn 2022

Photo by Verena Keller

Dear all,

The starlings are gathering, and every day new migrants appear – a clear sign that autumn has arrived. I hope that summer gave you the opportunity to relax despite the heat and drought affecting large parts of Europe. The summer period also brought some work for the authors of manuscripts to be published in the proceedings of the last EBCC conference. The editors of Ornithol. Beob. have received most of the revised manuscripts and are confident that they can be published in the December issue as planned.

I also hope that you have been able to make nice observations of birds around your homes or when travelling. Sadly, 2022 also brought unpleasant observations. The 30 dead Gannets I counted on Forvie beach in northeast Scotland in August were only a small part of all the birds dying from avian influenza this year. Gannets, Dalmatian Pelicans, Guillemots and terns are only some examples of colonial breeding birds that have been hit hard by the disease. It is too early to assess the impact on all these populations. Assessments need sound data on population sizes and trends, which fortunately are available for some species but not yet for all. The avian influenza outbreak has shown once more how important monitoring bird populations is, and monitoring will be essential to document the development and – hopefully – the recovery of affected populations. But there is also a need to better understand the dynamics of the outbreaks themselves, and, in this respect, EBCC has joined forces with EURING in order to use the data from the EuroBirdPortal (EBP) and the EURING Databank (EDB) to support the monitoring and risk assessment work of the European Food and Safety Authority (EFSA).

Verena Keller

Vice-Chair, EBCC

EBBA Live Farmland: a new EBCC project to update the distributions of farmland birds in Europe

EBBA2 represents a milestone for European ornithology and a source of inspiration for future developments. In April 2022, during the 22nd EBCC conference, the idea of updating data on breeding bird distributions on a relatively frequent and regular basis was presented. The group of farmland birds was proposed as a candidate for a pilot project on its overall decline and known interest in conservation. The idea was received with general enthusiasm from EBBA2 national coordinators, researchers and other attendees. This pilot project was called EBBA Live Farmland.

Now, after some months of preparation, the project is about to start. EBBA Live Farmland aims to produce updated species distributions and maps of change since EBBA2. For this purpose, the project attempts to make the best possible use of site-level data from the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS) and data from the EuroBirdPortal (EBP). The project is open to the participation of the EBCC community.

September PECBMS report published

The PECBMS presents the project´s progress since December 2021. In this period, we have made important innovations to our tools, which led to a faster process of data gathering, data control and easier index calculations. In April, we started cooperation with Malta and Iceland, and we keep supporting the new monitoring schemes in Moldova and Montenegro. We hope these new schemes will become a part of the PECBMS in the future. This summer, we collected data until the year 2021, so for the first time, we will publish the update with only a 1-year delay (compared to a 2-year delay in the past). We met the national coordinators at the PECBMS workshop during the EBCC 2022 conference in Lucerne via an online workshop or Slack Forum. Thanks to cooperation with researchers, the PECBMS data was used in three scientific papers. We stayed in touch with EU stakeholders and provided answers and advice upon request, most importantly regarding the new EU Nature Restoration Law.

Read the report

2022 PECBMS data collection finished

PECBMS has finished the collection and control of national indices. We thank all national coordinators for their cooperation and help to improve new tools. We welcomed Andorra to the partnership, so from now on, PECBMS will manage data from 30 European countries. This year, we asked the national coordinators for data on 170 “PECBMS” common bird species, but also non-PECBMS species could be uploaded to our Online tool. Therefore, both national and PECBMS coordinators could assess their quality. We will compute supranational indices and indicators in the next few days. We plan to publish the 2022 indices and indicators update in the second half of October at the latest.

New publication on the Birds of Denmark

In the past 30 years, 87 new species and 21 new breeding birds have been added to the list of birds in Denmark, 12 species have immigrated/re-immigrated as breeding birds, 7 species have bred randomly, while 5 species have become extinct. But above all, the status and occurrence pattern of more than 200 breeding and migratory birds, as well as rare birds, has changed significantly.

The book Systematic Overview of the Birds of Denmark 1800–2019 (in Danish) gives information on the status of all 489 spontaneously occurring bird species in Denmark, as well as independent sections for 22 subspecies and 12 species pairs/species groups, for which a reliable occurrence picture is available. It presents breeding maps from the latest Atlas (2014–2017), trends from the Common Bird Census Programme (1975–2019), maps and trends from Danish contributions to the International Waterbird Census and other national surveys of waterbirds (1967–2019), occurrence maps and phenology graphs from the Danish online portal DOFbasen (2002–2019) and distribution maps with the accumulated occurrence of rare species (National Rarities Committee, 1800–2019). The main authors of the book are volunteers and experienced field ornithologists, supplemented by staff from the University of Aarhus and DOF/BirdLife Denmark.

Can be purchased here

Spatial risk mapping reveals impacts on migratory birds

Migratory birds are declining globally because of how humans have modified the landscape over recent decades – according to new research from the University of East Anglia, the University of Porto and the University of Lisbon (both Portugal) and the Czech Society for Ornithology (Czech Republic). A new study, also based on PECBMS data, reveals that population declines have been most significant among species that migrate to areas with more human infrastructure – roads, buildings, power lines, wind turbines – and higher population densities and hunting levels. Habitat degradation and climate change have also played a part in driving long-term declines. Advances in satellite imagery allowed the team to map each of the 16 threats across Europe, Africa and Western Asia and create the first-ever large-scale map of hunting pressure across the region. The authors hope that pinpointing where birds are most exposed to the threats could help target conservation actions.

Buchan, C., Franco, A. M. A., Catry, I., Gamero, A., Klvaňová, A., & Gilroy, J. J. 2022: Spatially explicit risk mapping reveals direct anthropogenic impacts on migratory birds. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 00, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.13551.

Publication of the first Atlas of migratory birds in France

The French Migration Atlas (Atlas des Oiseaux Migrateurs de France) is the result of four years of intensive work. It has been made possible by the joint analysis of millions of data which include citizen science programs, ringing schemes, tracking studies and migration survey counts, as well as by the input of over 200 collaborators. Its 1,100 pages detail the strategies of each of the 319 species that regularly perform migratory movements over the country, from the global to the local scale. Spatial and temporal patterns are its main focus, along with migratory behaviour and conservation issues but also, whenever possible, population trends and shifts of strategies. This is the most detailed and complete synthesis of migratory birds ever published in France, with every chapter including English summaries and captions to provide access to non-French speakers.

Can be purchased here

New Wildlife Comeback Report will be launched on 27 September 2022

A new report by Rewilding Europe with contributions from the Zoological Society of London, EBCC and BirdLife International will be launched in London on 27 September. The first report was published in 2013 and described changes in abundance and distribution of selected animal species. The second report documents the comeback of selected species of birds and mammals again. EBCC contributed with maps of breeding distribution and distribution change of 25 bird species based on EBBA2. The maps were adapted to the approach used in the report and will be part of the publication.

Follow the info on the Wildlife Comeback web page.

The Swedish Bird Survey is ongoing since 1967. Today, there are three scheme coordinators, all based at Lund University. Åke Lindström took over the Swedish Breeding Bird Monitoring Scheme (which then also included Winter Bird Counts) from the founder Sören Svensson in 2002. After running all parts of the scheme up till 2006, he has gradually become more and more focused on scientific analyses of the data.

Martin Green has been involved since 2007. Martin is now the main person running the daily business of several sub-schemes of the Swedish Bird Survey and is also the brain behind some recent improvements aimed at covering more species, as well as introducing the counting of mammals and amphibians.

Fredrik Haas joined the Swedish Bird Survey in 2015, and since 2019 he is also responsible for the IWC. In addition, he coordinates a newly started scheme aimed at monitoring breeding waterbirds in the Swedish archipelagos.

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