Drivers of population change in forest birds: informing the National Species Recovery Programme approach

European forests are formed by natural drivers, such as disturbance due to windstorms, bark beetle outbreaks and fire, but also anthropogenic activities, such as forestry and infrastructure development. Forest birds are used widely as indicators of overall forest health and biodiversity.
Many European forest bird species have been recovering over the past decades. However, population trends are highly species-specific. The drivers of population trends are generally little studied. This also includes the impact of the current, rapid development of energy infrastructure (e.g. wind power stations and associated road networks resulting) in forests. While information on population trends is available for a good number of species, less is known about changes in community composition.

In this project, we aim

to improve national-level population trends for forest bird species using data integration models;
to disentangle drivers of changes in forest bird abundance, diversity and community composition, such as forest disturbance, structure and forest management;
to shed light on the role of recent infrastructure (set up due to the German energy transition policy) on driving forest bird abundance;
to investigate the role of protected areas in maintaining forest bird populations;
to identify and develop priorities for species and measures to be covered in the National Species Recovery Programme.

We will mobilize unstructured (e.g. from ornitho.de) and structured (from the German bird monitoring programmes) data to predict bird responses to potential drivers and assess change, and use model-based data integration to make the most out of data delivered by the various bird monitoring schemes.

This project is funded by a grant of the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN) and implemented in close collaboration with Dachverband Deutscher Avifaunisten (DDA).

Involved researchers: Femke Pflüger, Anne Graser, Caren Pertl, Jakob Katzenberger, Johannes Kamp