| This
report is the latest in a series of reports that are used by
conservation practitioners as a ready-reference guide to recent
changes in status of breeding birds in the UK. By publishing
it on the BTO website, we aim to make it available to a much
wider audience, especially to BTO members and the general birdwatching
public. We hope that it also provides 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. In summary, its aims are: |
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 include information on distributions,
from breeding-season and winter atlas projects, and on estimates
of the absolute size of breeding populations, which are reported
at intervals by the Avian Population Estimates Panel (Stone
et al. 1997, Baker
et al. 2006). 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. 2008), and the majority of species
covered by the Rare
Breeding Birds Panel (Holling
& RBBP 2007b,
2008), are not
included here. Wintering populations of waterfowl are covered
by the Wetland Bird Survey annual reports (e.g. Austin
et al. 2008) and by the WeBS alerts system (Maclean
& Austin 2008).
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 latest in a series, begun in 1997, produced under the
BTO's partnership with the Joint Nature Conservation Committee
(on 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. Only the first two reports
were published as paper reports, with subsequent ones being
produced solely as web documents. A complete list of all the
previous reports and links to those published online can be
found here.
Section 2 –
Methodology
Back
to Introduction Index |
