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1.3 The aims of this report
     
  The aims of this report are as follows:
     
  1) To provide a species-by-species overview of the trends in breeding population size and reproductive success of birds covered by BTO monitoring schemes over the past 30 years.
  2) To report on the observed population trends for the majority of breeding species with the exception of colonial seabirds which are well covered by the JNCC's Seabird Monitoring Programme (Upton et al. 2000), and the majority of species already covered by the Rare Breeding Birds Panel (Ogilvie 1998). Most wintering populations of waterfowl are well covered by the Wetland Bird Survey annual reports (e.g. Pollitt et al. 2000).
  3) To report on population trends over the UK as a whole, and to provide habitat and regional analyses where practical.
  4) To provide early warning alerts to JNCC and Country Agencies concerning worrying declines in population size or reproductive success, with special reference to species on the Conservation Importance Lists.
     
  The report will be updated regularly and it is meant to be a working document that can be used primarily by conservation practitioners as a ready reference guide to the current changes in status of breeding birds in the UK. (Breeding distributions are not included as these are already fully documented in the New Breeding Atlas (Gibbons et al. 1993) and breeding population sizes are not included because these are to be reported on regularly by the Avian Population Estimates Panel (Stone et al. 1997)). However, by producing this as a web-report, we hope that it will be regularly used by a wider audience, especially BTO members and the general bird-watching public. We also hope that it will be used more widely and will become a useful resource for schools, colleges and universities, the media, ecological consultants, decision makers, local government and the more general world of industry and commerce.
     
  The report is the fourth in a series produced as part of the BTO's work carried out under its Partnership with the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (on the behalf of Natural England, Scottish Natural Heritage, the Countryside Council for Wales, and the Environment and Heritage Service in Northern Ireland), as part of its programme of research into nature conservation. The first report was produced in 1997 (Crick et al. 1997) and investigated population trends exhibited by breeding species during the period 1971-1995. This second report (Crick et al. 1998), produced the following year, covered the period 1972-1996, and the third report (Baillie et al. 2001), produced last year, concentrated on trends observed over the period 1968-1999. It is the result of the sustained long-term fieldwork efforts of many thousands of the BTO's volunteer supporters. Without their enthusiasm for collecting these hard-won facts, the cause of conservation in the UK would be very much the poorer.

 

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This report should be cited as:
Baillie, S.R., Crick, H.Q.P., Balmer, D.E., Beaven, L.P., Downie, I.S., Freeman, S.N., Leech, D.I., Marchant, J.H.,
Noble, D.G., Raven, M.J., Simpkin, A.P., Thewlis, R.M. and Wernham, C.V. (2002) Breeding Birds in the Wider
Countryside: their conservation status 2001. BTO Research Report No. 278. BTO, Thetford. (http://www.bto.org/birdtrends)

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