Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS)
Population indices for 170 breeding bird species across 28 European countries, produced by ~15,000 volunteers counting birds with standardised protocols every year.
- Size
- 1.3 MB
- Format
- CSV, XLSX
- License
- CC-BY-4.0
- Access
- Open Access
- Source
- Zenodo (record 4590199)
License note: Use open subset only; ES/CY 2016-17 restricted
Your edits to the notebook only affect your own copy in the Hub. Changed it and want the original back? Restore it here.
Challenge
Are Europe's farmland birds really faring worse than its forest birds? Build a composite population trend for each group from the PECBMS indices and quantify how differently the two groups have fared since the 1980s.
- Where to start
- Load indices2017.csv (columns species, euring_code, year, index, se) and trends2017.csv (columns species, trend, class). There is no habitat column, so assign species to Farmland vs Forest using the PECBMS indicator lists (e.g. Alauda arvensis, Vanellus vanellus, Perdix perdix for farmland; Parus major, Sitta europaea, Regulus regulus for forest), keeping only Latin names present in the data. Pivot indices to year x species, restrict to a common gap-free window, take the geometric mean of the indices within each group, and rebase to 100.
- What to share
- A line chart comparing the two rebased composite trends over the years, the net percentage change per group, and a short conclusion on which group is declining faster — optionally cross-checked against the class column in trends2017.csv.
💬 Discuss this dataset, ask questions and share your results in its discussion thread. Challenges are open-ended — there's no single right answer.