Introduction
There are more than 20 online platforms collecting bird observations in Europe. Some cover a limited geographical area (e.g. a region or country) while others function across several countries. All these portals, unlike more traditional monitoring initiatives, which focus on structured data collection, aim mainly to obtain year-round data from the relatively unstructured but intensive and widespread activities of birdwatchers.
Despite the fact that data are gathered following simple standardised protocols (e.g. complete lists), or in some cases even no protocol (casual observations), the vast amount of data contained in these portals and the sheer amplitude of their combined geographical and taxonomic coverage offer great potential for research on the temporal and spatial distribution of birds across large geographical areas. Such knowledge is highly needed to improve our understanding of bird distributions and movements and to address issues concerned with conservation and management (e.g. wind farms, avian borne diseases, flight safety).
The EBP was established to unlock all this potential at the European scale by combining the data gathered by all the online portals operating across the continent. Given the diversity of initiatives and the well-established nature of some of them, any attempt to favour only one of the systems or to create a new common one would be impractical.
The EBP is the perfect companion to the work developed by the other two main projects undertaken by the EBCC: the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS) and the new European Breeding Bird Atlas (EBBA2). PECBMS, a joint initiative with BirdLife International, monitors breeding population trends across Europe, using large-scale and long-term common breeding bird surveys and developing indicators of the general state of nature, while EBBA2 will produce a precise snapshot of the breeding distribution of all European bird species for the whole continent and for a specific time window (2013–2017). The EBP project complements PECBMS and EBBA2 by focussing on the study of continental-wide seasonal changes in bird distribution as well as those temporal changes taking place too fast as to be properly tracked by more traditional monitoring projects. EPB, moreover, promotes the use of simple, standardized bird recording protocols, to improve the quality of the results that can be produced using these data.
