Steeves/Trail Mix: Do your bit to conserve bird populations

One of the most unfortunate things about government budget cutbacks is that when you delete a monitoring program you’re not only throwing out the data from a single year, but you’re throwing out all that you’ve invested over decades.

Regular monitoring is vital to keeping tabs on the status of species and establishing trends, then to figuring out what has caused the trend and whether there’s anything we can do about it, if it’s a negative trend.

Without it, species will disappear quietly off the face of the earth, perhaps due to causes we can manage and thus prevent their extirpation.

In lieu of government, because politics plays such an unfortunate role in consistent monitoring, non-profit groups are now taking on the job.

For instance, Bird Studies Canada has compiled data from the last 40 years to put together a picture of how this country’s birds are faring, and there are some warning signs.

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The SCALE project partners say birds are key indicators of biodiversity changes

Conservation practice, backed with strong data and recommendations, is high on the EU agenda. One of the most important ways to identify changes in the environment and in natural populations is to focus on biodiversity and environmental monitoring. The data generated from monitoring helps decision makers and researchers design and assess biodiversity policies, conservation management, land use decisions and environmental protection.

The SCALES ('Securing the conservation of biodiversity across administrative levels and spatial, temporal, and ecological scales') project has performed an evaluation that focused on providing scientific and policy research required to guide scale-dependent management actions. SCALES has received almost EUR 7 million under the Environment Theme of the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

The SCALE project partners said birds are key indicators of biodiversity because of their distribution and popularity on a global scale. Data indicate that there are more than 600 all monitoring programmes in Europe. Presented in the journal Nature Conservation, the evaluation shows that almost 28,000 people have participated in the 144 monitoring programmes that cover birds, spending nearly 80,000 person days each year.

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