The generation and use of bird population indicators in Europe

Abstract

Global and regional targets to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss bring with them the need to measure the state of nature and how it is changing. A number of different biodiversity indicators have been developed in response and here we consider bird population indicators in Europe. Birds are often used as surrogates for other elements of biodiversity because they are so well known and well studied, and not for their unique intrinsic value as environmental indicators. Yet, in certain situations and at particular scales, trends in bird populations correlate with those of other taxa making them a valuable biodiversity indicator with appropriate caveats. In this paper, we look at two case studies, in the UK and Europe as a whole, where headline bird indicators, that is, summary statistics based on bird population trends, have been developed and used to inform and assist policy makers. Wild bird indicators have been adopted by many European countries and by the European Union as indicators of biodiversity and of sustainable development. In the discussion, we review the strengths and weaknesses of using bird populations in this way, and look forward to how this work might be developed and expanded.

Comparisons Between Autonomous Acoustic Recordings and Avian Point Counts in Open Woodland Savanna

“…Gage and Miller (1978) used human acoustic observations to document avian responses to spruce budworm over 22 yr ;Inger et al (2014) used a 30 yr dataset on 144 bird species to demonstrate the decline of common bird populations in Europe; and Gregory et al (2005) demonstrated the decline of farmland birds with data collected from 18 countries between 1980 and 2004. Given the availability of high-quality bird data and the fact that birds exhibit wide geographic and habitat distribution and play diverse roles in ecosystem functioning, bird population trends are often used as indicators of environmental change (Sekercioglu 2006, Gregory et al 2008, Sheehan et al 2010. For example, the Wild Bird Index (WBI) was developed to evaluate progress toward the international goal of reducing the global rate of biodiversity loss (Butchart et al 2010, Sheehan et al 2010).…”

Habitat Preferences for Territory Selection by the Endangered Eastern Iberian Reed BuntingEmberiza Schoeniclus witherbyi

“…Again, we used TRIM to estimate the missing country totals, in a way equivalent to imputing missing counts for particular sites. This procedure was trialed in van Strien et al (2001) and has been applied subsequently by Gregory et al (2005Gregory et al ( , 2007Gregory et al ( , 2008. We combined the all-sites totals in five regional groupings (see Table 1).…”

“…Specifically, we examine trends in European bird abundance in different habitats with the strong expectation that grouped species trends will differ by habitat, by region and by migratory status of the species following our previous work (Gregory et al 2005(Gregory et al , 2007(Gregory et al , 2008. We focus our attention on widespread farmland birds, but to provide context, we also present trends for all the species monitored by the PECBMS and trends for common forest birds too.…”

The geometric mean of relative abundance indices: a biodiversity measure with a difference

“…These include the international Living Planet Index (Loh et al 2005, Hails et al 2008; Fig. 1) and the UK's Wild Bird Indicators (BTO 2011, Gregory et al 2008, Gregory and van Strien 2010Fig. 2).…”