På svenska
The Swedish Bird Survey – a nationwide monitoring scheme
The aim of the project is to monitor the population size changes of Swedish breeding birds. Since 1975, birds are counted in summer and winter at hundreds of different sites using standardized methods. In this way about 150 of the 250 breeding species are surveyed. The project was started by Sören Svensson and led by him until I took over in 2002.
Species-specific trends are updated yearly and published in a report and on the homepage. Apart from the species trends being important in themselves, they are also combined into indicators that are used in various ways to indicate development of biodiversity. At the national level, bird indicators are used to assess the progress towards achieving them the environmental objectives set by the Swedish parliament (see link on the right). Presently there are indicators for “Flourishing lakes and streams”, “Thriving wetlands”, “Sustainable forests”, “A varied agricultural landscape”, “A magnificent mountain landscape” and “A rich diversity of plant and animal life”. Internationally, our data are included in the Wild Bird Indicator of the European Union (see link on the right). There are several ongoing collaborations with scientists in Sweden based on our bird monitoring data.
For more information visit our external home page.
Recent publications related to the project:
Ottvall, R., Edenius, L., Elmberg, J., Engström, H., Green, M., Holmqvist, N., Lindström, Å., Tjernberg, M. & Pärt, T. 2009. Population trends for Swedish breeding birds. – Ornis Svecica 19:117–192.
Jiguet, F., Devictor, V., Ottvall, R., van Turnhout, C., van der Jeugt, H. & Lindström, Å. 2010. Bird population trends are linearly affected by climate change along species thermal ranges. – Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 277: 3601–3608.
Devictor, V., van Swaay, C., Brereton, T., Brotons, L., Chamberlain, D., Heliölä, J., Herrando, S., Julliard, R., Kuussaari, M., Lindström, Å., Reif, J., Roy, D. B., Schweiger, O., Settele, J., Stefanescu, C., Van Strien, A., Van Turnhout, C., Vermouzek, Z., WallisDeVries, M., Wynhoff, I. & Jiguet, F. 2012. Differences in the climate debts of birds and butterflies at a continental scale. – Nature Climate Change 2:121–124.
Le Viol, I., Jiguet, F., Brotons, L., Herrando, S., Lindström, Å., Pearce-Higgins, J. W., Reif, J., Van Turnhout, C. & Devictor, V. 2012. More and more generalists: two decades of changes in the European bird fauna. – Biol. Lett.8:780–782.
Lindström, Å., Green, M., Paulson, G., Smith, H.G. & Devictor, V. 2012. Rapid changes in bird community composition at multiple spatial scales in response to recent climate change. – Ecography, published online 7 September 2012.
Stjernman, M., Green, M., Lindström, Å., Olsson, Ola, Ottvall, R. & Smith, H. G. 2013. Habitat-specific bird trends and their effect on the Farmland Bird Index. – Ecological Indicators 24:382–391.
Page manager: Frida Rosengren
Questions about the website: Web group
Publisher: Department of Biology
Last modified 17 Sep 2012