Program

The main aim of the presentation is to introduce how citizen science data on European bird populations, including the steppe species, have been gathered, analysed, and used in research and policy on a supra-national European level. Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS) is one of the core programmes of the European Bird Census Council (EBCC). Its main aim is to use common birds as indicators of the general state of nature using large-scale and long-term monitoring data on changes in European breeding bird populations. Today, the scheme gathers data from 30 European countries and annually produces indices of 170 bird species. The main outputs are the bird indicators, most notably the Farmland Bird Index (FBI). The European Commission has accepted the FBI as one of the sustainable development indicators (SDI), agro-environmental indicators (AEI), and Pan-European Streamlining European Biodiversity (SEBI) indicators. The 39 species in the FBI are habitat specialists inhabiting open countryside such as farmland, grassland, and steppes. Recently, the EU regulation on nature restoration includes obligations for Member States to achieve an increasing trend at the national level of FBIs by 2030 and thereafter. In 2022, EBCC started another project, EBBA Live, aiming to update data on species’ distributions more frequently, ensure they are harmonised across Europe, and complement the role of atlases such as the European Breeding Bird Atlas (EBBA2). To date, resulting maps are available online, showing the occurrence of 50 farmland bird species based on data from general bird monitoring projects and the new 10 km modelled distribution maps for the post-EBBA2 period 2018–2022. We also aim to assess changes in distribution using monitoring data, but that is more challenging and deserves further development. However, examples of the estimated change in the probability of occurrence between the EBBA2 period (2013–2017) and the EBBA Live Farmland period (2018–2022) will be shown. Some examples of steppe bird trends and changes in distribution will be introduced, such as the steeply declining Little Bustard, which has also experienced a decrease in distribution, or the Greater Short-toed Lark, which has a stable population trend but has also shrunk in distribution.