The European bird monitoring programmes as potential source of geo-referenced bird data Petr Voříšek Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS) & European Breeding Bird Atlas 2 (EBBA2), Czech Society for Ornithology/European Bird Census Council (EBCC)

Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS) Goal: to use common birds as indicators Source of data: national/regional monitoring schemes 27 countries, 163 species in km 500m Standardised methods Volunteer fieldworkers >

Species indices Main PECBMS output s Common bird indicators More on

Changes in absolute abundance and biomass Inger et al Ecology Letters.

Regional indices

Use of PECBMS outputs for policy & promotion purposes PECBMS outputs used in 23 scientific peer-reviewed papers Common bird indicators included in 7 international sets of indicators accepted by governments as official indicator in at least 26 European countries

PECBMS network National Coordinators Volunteers Central Coordination Unit Statistics Netherlands Technical Group Steering Group raw data Expertise software coordination advice coordination advice national indices oversees the project management assists with technical statistical issues Annual Indices, Indicators & Reports

TRIM (= TRends & Indices for Monitoring data): analyses time series of count data from monitoring scheme with missing observations uses log-linear models and Poisson regression considers both site-effect and year-effect in the models allows to incorporate weights and covariates in the calculation calculates species yearly indices and trends (slopes) Calculation national & supranational indices

Production of European indices & indicators 1.TRIM output files from national coordinators 2.Data quality control at central coordination level 3.Production of European indices and indicators (PECBMS coordination team)

Contributing countries and their time series

Always produced by TRIM and regularly used by PECBMS: OUT file – contains outputs of calculation, indices and trends OCV file – contains year-year covariances (needed only for calculation of European indices) Data files produced by TRIM

Optionally: S1 – contains slope parameters and indices for each year F1 – contrains estimated and imputed counts on site level Data files produced by TRIM So far, F1 files used only for special research studies and internal exploration of the usage of site-level data. Use of F1 files subject of approval by national coordinators.

F1 files in details Example: data collated in 2012 Country nameScheme nameNumber of plotsFirs yearLast yearN. species Austria Czech Republic Denmark Finland France Italy LatviaLatvia New LatviaLatvia Old NetherlandNetherlands NorwayNorway New Poland Republic of IrelandIreland SpainCatalonia Spain SwedenSweden New SwedenSweden Old Switzerland United KingdomUK

F1 files in details: Sites at different spatial resolution depending on fieldmethods 1km 500m Large amount of data Inconsistencies in site codes F1 not available when data from more schemes within a country are combined Use of weights and covariates in models modifies the values in F1 Completeness of species asemblage info? Various coordination systems used Approval by national coordinators needed

European Breeding Bird Atlas (EBBA2) Updated distribution maps for all European breeding birds at 50x50 km resolution: Breeding evidence Abundance Changes in distribution from 1980s to 2010s at 50x50 km resolution fine-grained distribution for as many bird species as possible and project them at a resolution of 10x10 km (model) This atlas will be one of the biggest biodiversity datasets across the world!!

Online bird portals Diversity of online bird data gathering platforms in Europe EuroBird Portals (EBP) Initiative

Which data the most suitable? When needed? Format? Conditions of use? What to be done? (capacity?) Questions