European Bird Census Council

The European Bird Census Council and SEO/BirdLife are pleased to invite you to the 18^th International Conference of the EBCC.

This report presents the brief summary of activities and achievements of the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS) from November 2008 to March 2009. In these last 5 months our main attention was in the preparation of the 3rd PECBMS workshop in Prague. Further distribution of the ´Best Practice Guide´ publication was organised and carried out. Besides these activities, work on data quality improvements and new data collection continued.

Climate change is already having a detectable impact on birds across Europe, say a group of scientists publishing their findings to create the world's first indicator of the climate change impacts on wildlife at a continental scale.

In 2008, the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS) has produced already the fourth update of the European wild bird indicators. This report summarizes the set of head indicators as well as describes computation methods and data.

EU unlikely to meet its 2010 biodiversity target

Brussels and Prague, 2 December 2008 - According to the latest data from the European Bird Census Council (EBCC) and BirdLife International, many of Europe´s formerly "common" farmland birds continue to suffer from the effects of agricultural intensification.