European Bird Census Council

The European Bird Census Council (EBCC), together with Catalan Ornithological Institute (ICO), Czech Society for Ornithology (CSO) and with support from the Natural History Museum of Barcelona, have organised the workshop 'National atlases in the context of the New European Breeding Bird Atlas'.

3-day workshop on statistical mapping and modeling of distribution and abundance using R, WinBUGS and JAGS will take place immediately before the 19^th international conference of the European Bird Census Council (EBCC) in Cluj/Romania in September 2013.

The knowledge of the state of bird population are based on a large number of monitoring schemes. These schemes can be sensitive to the timing of monitoring due to the phenology of species, which in turn may affect the detectability of species during censuses.

How much biodiversity was lost or changed during the last year on our planet? This question is hard to answer because, contrary to what occurs regarding climate, a global system of harmonized observations to monitor biodiversity change does not exist. An international team of 30 scientists, including Richard Gregory and Stu Butchart from RSPB/BirdLife, proposed recently in Science a global biodiversity monitoring system based on a set of essential variables.

The report summarizes the activities of the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS) from July 2012 to December 2012. Due to funding uncertainties, we focused our work on maintaining the core activities and securing funding for the PECBMS. Nevertheless, we have started to collect national data for the next update of PECBMS outputs. Updated European species trends and indicators are expected to be published in June 2013.

The next EBCC conference will take place on 17 - 21 September 2013, in Cluj, Romania.