European Bird Census Council expresses its deep concern about the military attack of the Russian Federation on Ukraine. Birds do not know borders, and their research and conservation require international cooperation. Within EBCC projects, we work together with individuals and organisations across whole Europe towards common goals. Regardless of differences in languages, cultures, religion, or political views, the EBCC network has always shown a sense of cooperation and solidarity.
A year after the publication of the EBBA2 book, the European Bird Census Council (EBCC) has launched a completely new EBBA2 website. Everybody can access it at www.ebba2.info and see interactive distribution maps of all European breeding birds, find out more about the project and its outputs, and make data requests. The web version of EBBA2 complements the book, where detailed species accounts and summary chapters can be found.
Read about Goosander distribution in Switzerland, meet two EBCC board members, Henning Heldbjerg and Danae Portolou, and explore Danish Common Bird Census websites.
One of the teams coordinating the EBBA2 project was based at the Czech Society for Ornithology (CSO). Petr Voříšek, Marina Kipson, Martin Kupka, Jana Škorpilová and Alena Klvaňová were responsible for network coordination, communication, project management support and artwork coordination. On 6 November, the team was awarded the CSO Award for a considerable contribution to the coordination of EBBA2, a milestone in European ornithology. Congratulations!
Natural sounds, and bird songs, in particular, play a key role in building and maintaining our connection with nature – but a major new study published on 2 November in Nature Communications reveals that the sounds of spring are changing, with dawn choruses across North America and Europe becoming quieter and less varied.
We are happy to invite you to attend the EBCC Annual General Meeting (AGM) at 19.00hrs (CET) on 20 April, to be held via Microsoft Teams. As well as the normal content of the AGM, this year we have invited three speakers to give short talks about the surveying and atlasing work within their countries.
On 26 March 2021, the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS) network, comprising sixty-six European scientists, published a landmark paper describing the methods, outputs and their use in research and conservation in Scientific Data. This leading open data journal is a part of the Nature family of journals. Alongside the paper, Long-term and large-scale multispecies dataset tracking population changes of common European breeding birds, the database containing supra-national and national population indices of 170 bird species from 28 countries are made publicly available. We believe that the publication will encourage further studies using this unique and powerful dataset based on decades of bird monitoring by thousands of skilled volunteer fieldworkers. Finally, this paper will help to inform and guide conservation science in Europe.
