EBCC Newsletter

Autumn 2023

Photo by Jan Grünwald

Dear readers

Here in central Switzerland, temperatures have still risen 30°C in the last few days, unusual for mid-September. Over the summer, across Europe, headlines have been dominated by weather extremes, from heatwaves to massive rainfalls causing landslides and flooding. While the climate crisis is increasingly recognised as a challenge, the equally important biodiversity crisis still receives less attention. This became apparent again in the discussions on the EU restoration law. In June, we informed you about the process. Unfortunately, the European Parliament dismantled the critical part of the law related to farmland.

Further negotiations within the EU legislation process could still reverse it and make the Nature Restoration Law a useful tool in restoring nature in (part of) Europe. However, equally, the law could be damaged even more during the final phase of negotiations. In any case, providing policymakers at international and national levels with scientifically sound information on the state of nature continues to be important.

In this newsletter, you can read more about the EBCC projects, new developments such as the new LIFE EBP project, a new major scientific publication based on EBBA2 data, and updates on bird monitoring across Europe. We also look forward to the next EBCC Conference, still some time away, but note the dates!

Verena Keller

The 23rd EBCC Conference in 2025

Despite the turbulent times, the team at the University of Latvia is working to organise the next EBCC conference, “Bird Numbers 2023”. The conference is planned as a physical meeting in Riga, Latvia, from 31 March to 4 April 2025. More details will be released as the planning progresses. The first announcement is to be expected in the winter of 2023/spring of 2024.

Contribute to the Small Grant Fund

Following the Small Grant Fund launch in the spring, the EBCC Office received ten applications from ten countries. The projects are under evaluation by the EBCC Board. Any contribution to the Fund will help EBCC support bird monitoring in areas where it is needed and will be much appreciated. Find out more about how you can make donations to the Small Grant Fund on the EBCC website.

New LIFE project reinforcing EBP

This July, we started a new LIFE project, the "LIFE EBP reinforcement" project. As the previous LIFE EBP project, this will be again a LIFE Preparatory project and, therefore, will address ad hoc EU Legislative and Policy Priorities. In this case, the project will reinforce the capabilities of the EBP and render its data compatible with those of the other EBCC projects (EBBA2 and PECBMS) in order to allow it to contribute the evidence required to inform the successful delivery of the EU Biodiversity Strategy.

PECBMS September 2023 report

Between 1 March and 1 September, the PECBMS successfully delivered the EC tender and provided the Commission with three documents on Bird Indicators´ use in policy. We have prepared a new strategy for 2023–2027, defined PECBMS´s mission and vision, and an action plan for the next five years to develop the scheme. We gathered national data from the national coordinators and checked them carefully to start supranational calculations. The scheme representatives attended several international meetings (EuropaBON, Biodiversa+) discussing the future of European biodiversity monitoring. We organised the regular Steering and Technical Group meeting in March to discuss the challenges. Finally, with ICO and CREAF in April, we organised a workshop on Mapping the loss of farmland birds in the EU, presenting the study outputs combining EBBA2 data and PECBMS site-level data.

for the 2023 PECBMS update

This year, the data collection started already in early February, providing enough time for the coordinators to deliver datasets until the year 2022 before the start of the breeding season. We have collected data from 28 countries; data from one country is still insecure, and another could not deliver the data. We will start supranational index calculation in September and plan to publish the update in October 2023. We would like to thank the national coordinators for the delivery of high-quality data and patience in answering our peculiar questions.

New publications based on EBBA data

In the summer newsletter, we presented the paper “Ecological barriers mediate spatiotemporal shifts of bird communities at a continental scale” (Marjakangas et al. 2023), published in PNAS, Now a second major analysis based on EBBA2 data has been published, “Local colonisations and extinctions of European birds are poorly explained by changes in climate suitability” (Howard et al. 2023). The article, published in Nature Communications, investigated what factors explain the colonisation and extinctions of species between EBBA1 (1980s) and EBBA2 (2013–2017). Unexpectedly, changes in species distribution were poorly explained by climate or land use changes during the study period. The colonisation and extinctions of 50 km squares were primarily explained by initial climatic conditions and species traits. However, other factors, such as fine-scale changes in habitat quality, which information is poorly available at the European level, could also play a role.

Ecology and Conservation of Mountain Birds

A new book, "Ecology and Conservation of Alpine Birds", provides updated information on high-altitude mountain species worldwide. The book has also used common bird monitoring data from four European mountain ranges to estimate population trends of species up to 2020. The new analyses show that there has been a recent recovery in mountain bird numbers, and the overall European mountain bird indicator has slightly increased during 2002–2020. However, there are differences between areas and species. The regional indicator of the Alps has increased but declined in the UK upland.

Ecology and Conservation of Alpine Birds. Chamberlain, D. C., A. Lehikoinen, and K. Martin. (Eds) Ecology and Biodiversity Series, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

Bird monitoring in Ukraine: First results

In 2023, despite the difficult wartime conditions, the first surveys for the PECBMS implemented by the Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS) were done in Ukraine. As the main method, passive acoustic monitoring was used due to the lack of ornithologists and volunteers on the sites. That became possible only thanks to the help of the company WildLife Acoustics, the Catalan Ornithological Institute and the Czech Society for Ornithology, who provided 16 acoustic recorders SM micro for surveys in Ukrainian Polesia and Carpathians.

The aim of FZS activity within the collaboration with Nature Preservation Fund Institutions is to establish a Common Bird Monitoring Scheme in Ukraine: develop the methodology applied for national conditions, test it and make surveys using ARU. Eight protected areas in Carpathians and adjacent areas and two protected areas in Polesia participated in surveys. Total number of transects was 30. Analyses were done in the program Raven Lite. Preliminary results showed that 40 bird species were recorded.

This initiative represents a significant step for Ukraine in biodiversity conservation and understanding the impact of global changes on the natural environment.

New Dutch Breeding Bird Report

The annual results of the Dutch Breeding Bird monitoring coordinated by Sovon (Dutch Centre for Field Ornithology) were published in late July. This report presents an overview of the breeding population trends of 199 species, both common, rare and colonial breeding birds, in The Netherlands up to and including 2022. Among the species that are doing well are some that only rather recently established themselves in the Netherlands, such as Middle Spotted Woodpecker and Cetti’s Warbler. Other species with relatively high numbers were Eurasian Bittern and Red-necked Grebe. Many farmland bird species continued to decline in 2022; Black-tailed Godwit, Ruff, Eurasian Curlew, Common Redshank, Eurasian Oystercatcher and Eurasian Tree Sparrow all reached their lowest population level since the start of the counts in 1984.

Most woodland birds are increasing, they are profiting from forest maturation and more natural management of forests. Most marshland species have also increased, continuing their comeback from the 1970s and 1980s winter droughts in the Sahel and profiting from marshland rehabilitation.

Download a PDF with an English summary

Hans Schmid retired

At the end of August, Hans Schmid retired after working at the Swiss Ornithological Institute for 37 years. Hans joined the institute in 1986, where he supported Niklaus Zbinden in various monitoring projects. His first big project was the coordination of the second national breeding bird atlas, published in 1998. Based on the experience with simplified territory mapping used for the atlas, the Swiss Common Bird Monitoring project was set up in 1999. From the beginning and up to this year, Hans coordinated this project, always motivating volunteers and looking for improvements on the technical side. Hans also quickly saw the potential of the online platform Ornitho and established it as the national platform ornitho.ch in 2007. It took not long for Hans to realise the potential of combining Ornitho and other platforms at the European level. Hans further developed his idea together with Gabriel Gargallo and the Ornitho International Steering Committee (which Hans set up and chaired for many years). This resulted in the formal start of the EuroBirdPortal (EBP) project in 2013.

Thus, Hans impersonated bird monitoring as not many others and can truly be named the “father of EBP”. We wish Hans all the best in his new phase of life!

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