The European Union has adopted the farmland bird index long-list structural indicator for Europe
Bird populations are a good indicator of overall environmental sustainability. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), BirdLife International and the European
Bird Census Council (EBCC) have developed a biodiversity indicator based on he population trends of representative species of "common" (not globally threatened) birds.
- Common bird indicators show the average trends in abundance of a selected set of species. They are especially useful in showing change in the overall condition of ecosystems, which is difficult and expensive to measure directly.
- Using birds has many advantages: excellent data, based on the volunteer efforts of skilled birdwatchers; a stable taxonomy; a thorough knowledge of ecology and behaviour; meaningful responses to environmental change, and great resonance and symbolic value with the public and decision-makers.
- Bird populations integrate a set of environmental changes, because they are mobile and often wide-ranging. Bird numbers also respond more slowly than those of smaller organisms, and at a larger spatial scale.
- Strengths of common bird indicators include their statistical robustness, relative simplicity, cost-effectiveness and ease of update.
- Common bird indicators can help measure progress towards reducing the rate of biodiversity loss at the national, regional and global levels.
NATIONAL: The UK common bird indicator- This indicator is based on population trends of common breeding birds.
- It is one of the UK Government"s 15 headline indicators of the sustainability of lifestyles in the UK.
- The UK common bird indicator shows large declines in common woodland and especially farmland birds since 1970.
- The UK Government has adopted a formal commitment to "reverse the long-term decline in the number of farmland birds by 2020".
- UK land-use policy is now coupling agricultural production with the needs of maintaining and restoring biodiversity.
The UK common bird indicator
REGIONAL: The Pan-European common bird indicator
- This indicator shows average trends in population sizes of a suite of common breeding birds across 18 European countries.
- It is based on national annual breeding bird surveys conducted by skilled volunteers.
- It shows that common farmland birds in Europe have declined steeply over the last two decades, common woodland birds have declined moderately, whilst common generalist
species have increased.
- The European Union has adopted the farmland bird index as a “long-list structural indicator” for Europe.
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The Pan-European common bird indicator
GLOBAL: Scaling up common bird indicators- Population trends of common breeding birds can feed through to, and help improve, global indicators based on species" population trends, such as the Living Planet Index.
- Methods used in Europe can readily be applied in other regions with similar data sets, such as North America and Australia.
- Indicators are under development for species groups that have been counted in many countries for many years, such as waterbirds (led by Wetlands International), seabirds and birds of prey.
- Thousands of birdwatchers around the world make bird lists, which can provide a reliable index of species abundance changes. Such lists are now being captured through web-based systems in a number of countries - see www.worldbirds.org
Are birds good indicators?
Birds are valuable indicator species for biodiversity conservation for a number of reasons.
- Birds have widespread popular appeal and therefore make good flagship species for mobilising volunteer-based monitoring networks (harnessing the power of citizen science), as well as for education and advocacy within civil society.
- Birds occupy a very broad range of ecosystems, have varied natural histories and are widely dispersed in all regions and countries of the world. They are high in the food chain, thus integrating changes at lower levels.
- They are the best known and documented major taxonomic group, especially in terms of the sizes and trends of populations and distributions, and the number of species (c.10,000) is manageable, thereby permitting comprehensive and rigorous analyses.
- They are sensitive to many kinds of environmental disturbance and can be used to monitor potentially harmful changes in the environment.
Some examples
Some examples of birds as indicators of environmental change follow below. In most of the cases, changes in bird numbers and distributions were first detected by citizen-based bird-monitoring schemes:
- Evidence suggests that range changes by birds may be among the first observable symptoms of human-induced climate change. For example, in Costa Rica lowland forest birds are extending their ranges up mountain slopes, apparently because the high-altitude cloud-forests are drying out as a result of global warming.
- The continuing dramatic decline in numbers of farmland birds in western Europe is indicative of the continuing intensification of agricultural practices and the non-sustainability of the European Union"s current Common Agricultural Policy.
- Numbers of a small migratory songbird, Common Whitethroat Sylvia communis, fell very sharply across Europe in 1969. The cause was traced to the onset in 1968 of a very severe drought in their wintering grounds in sub-Saharan Africa, which also caused the deaths of up to 250,000 people by the time that the drought broke in 1973. Discoveries such as this were among the first to publicise links between issues such as desertification, climate change and biodiversity loss, well beyond the affected regions.
- In the 1950s and 1960s, a huge drop in the numbers of Peregrine Falcons Falco peregrinus and other birds of prey in Europe and the USA led to the realisation that the persistent insecticide DDT was accumulating in the food chain, and that significant amounts were increasingly being found in people. As a result, in the 1970s some countries restricted or banned the use of DDT, and consequently experienced a rebound in raptor numbers and a strong decrease in human contamination.
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