Abstract from BTO Research Report No 257:

Siriwardena, G.M., Greenwood, J.J.D. & Clark, N.A. (2001)

Bird indicators of sustainability for the water industry.
ISBN 1-902576-33-0

Executive Summary

I. INTRODUCTION

In 1998, the UK government (specifically the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR)) funded work by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) and Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) to produce one of several indicators of sustainable development in the UK from existing and ongoing bird surveys (Gregory et al. 1999). Birds were chosen to signify biodiversity and environmental health in general because they are easily the best-monitored taxon in the UK. The resulting indicator became one of 14 measures originally publicized as tools for the future monitoring of the sustainability of development.

The idea that key aspects of national biodiversity can be summarized effectively in a single index number, such that future changes will be easily detected and easily communicated to a wide audience, is an attractive one. It also leads naturally to the suggestion that regional and habitat-specific information can be collated in a similar way to assist with management decisions at smaller spatial scales. Indices such as this will never provide a complete assessment of biodiversity or of the health of the environment, but can provide useful pointers given that they are constructed with care and interpreted appropriately.

This report describes exploratory analyses of existing UK bird survey data investigating how indicators of sustainability might be developed from bird census information for one sub-set of habitats for which particularly good summer and winter data are available: wetlands. The work was commissioned by Northumbrian Water and focused both on water bodies owned by the water industry and on wetlands in general, nationally. We have produced indicators for three broad types of wetland (also sub-divided as shown in parentheses):

1) still waters (natural and man-made, reservoirs and gravel pits);
2) linear waterways (large and small);
3) reedbeds, water meadows and other damp sites (separately).

In addition to these, national, indicators, we have investigated regional sub-divisions of the available information, concentrating on the constituent countries of the UK and the English Regional Development Agency (RDA) regions (for several water companies, including Northumbrian Water, the appropriate RDA region is approximately equivalent to the company’s catchment area). RDA regions are becoming a key administrative division in the government of the UK and have responsibilities in ensuring the sustainability of development, and they form the geographical basis for new, all-habitats sub-divisions of the headline wild bird indicator (Robinson et al. 2000).

We have followed the rationale and methods for the headline indicators project (Gregory et al. 1999) because this approach has been accepted by the government and adopted by other indicator projects (e.g. Robinson et al. 2000). A number of important issues arise from a critical review of the headline indicators work, which shows that great improvements to the methods used could easily be made. We have attempted to address those issues that are methodological by adapting the approach taken, whilst retaining the overall approach used previously; we consider further, more general issues in the Discussion.

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