This document is the result of the sustained fieldwork 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.The data we present here are supplemented by information on breeding distributions in the 1988-91 Breeding Atlas (Gibbons et al. 1993), and on estimates of absolute size of breeding populations, which are reported on regularly by the Avian Population Estimates Panel (Stone et al. 1997). Colonial seabirds, which are well covered by the recently published results of Seabird 2000 (Mitchell et al. 2004) and by the JNCC's Seabird Monitoring Programme (Mavor et al. 2004), and the majority of species covered by the Rare Breeding Birds Panel (Ogilvie 2003), are not included here. Wintering populations of waterfowl are covered by the Wetland Bird Survey annual reports (e.g. Pollitt et al. 2003) and by the WeBS alerts system (Austin et al. 2004).

The main emphasis of this report is on trends in the abundance and demography of individual species. The data on trends in abundance also provide the basis for multi-species indicators of bird population changes (Gregory et al. 2004). The Wild Bird Indicator has been adopted as one of the UK Government's 15 headline Quality of Life indicators. Furthermore, the related Farmland Bird Indicator is now being used as the basis of the Government's target for farmland bird recovery. This approach is now being extended more widely through a collaboration between EBCC, BirdLife and RSPB to produce pan European bird indicators.

The report is the sixth in a series produced under the BTO's 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 (Crick et al. 1997) investigated population trends exhibited by breeding species during 1971-95. The third report (Baillie et al. 2001), which was the first to be produced solely as a web document, documented trends during 1968-99. The current report directly supersedes Crick et al. (2004), which included data up to 2002. A complete list of all the previous reports and links to all those published online can be found here.

Section 2 - Methodology

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