EuroBirdPortal RSS Feed

Local Observation.org portals launched in four countries of SE Europe

29/08/2025

During April and May, official launch events for national Observation.org platforms were held in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Montenegro. The partners from these countries have decided to incorporate Observation.org as their official national platform for collecting bird data and have translated it into local languages. This development has been possible thanks to the LIFE22-PLP-ES-EBP reinforcement project and is an important first step towards making the data collection more accessible to wider public in these respective countries, enabling capacity building and growth within the ornithological network as well as increasing qualitative and quantitative data collection.

In Albania, the partner AOS (Albanian OrnithologicalSociety) held the launching event at Divjaka-Karavasta National Park. The event was attended by 31 students, along with staff from the Regional Administration for Protected Areas (RAPA) Fier. Participants had a chance to listen to a lecture where topics of citizen science, bird monitoring and importance of complete lists were stressed along with presenting the Observation as a national platform, followed by a guided field activity at the lagoon. This was a practical way of presenting the usage of the Observation app, and familiarizing participants with the app’s main features.

Center forthe Protection and Research of Birds (CZIP) in Montenegro organized the event at their office in Podgorica where representatives from the Public Enterprise for National Parks and the Environmental Protection Agency, both part of the Ministry of Ecology, Spatial Planning and Urbanism, were present. This enabled demonstrating the potential of the app for future biodiversity monitoring in Montenegro and emphasized its importance in the context of the country’s EU accession negotiations. So far, 149,567 observations have been collected through the Observation.org app in Montenegro, including 36,480 photos. Most importantly, 1,097 individual observers have contributed, and the number of observations, photos, and users continues to grow steadily.

Kosovo Ornithological Society (KOS) held the event that brought together representatives from several institutions, mainly from the NGO sector, who were introduced to the platform and its importance in advancing bird monitoring efforts in Kosovo. The presentation was well received, and participants expressed strong interest in contributing to this growing citizen science network.

Finally, "Naše Ptice“ (Bosnia and Herzegovina) held an on-line event with 17 participants, namely members of the society. During the event, they were introduced to the Observation.org webpage and the ObsMapp mobile application as well as importance of collecting complete species lists. In addition, information about the Observation.org portal and the methodology for collecting complete species lists was sent by email to 153 members of the Ornithological Society "Naše Ptice“ to encourage wider participation in this citizen science initiative. A practical field demonstration on using the ObsMapp application was organized for the members and volunteers of "Naše Ptice“ in Hutovo Blato Nature Park, connected to the weekend data collection challenge. This further enabled participants to practice real-time data entry, explore the app's functionalities, and learn how to document their observations effectively while contributing valuable data for the monitoring of bird populations in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

We wish the newly established national portals in SE Europe a long and fruitful contribution to the overall European bird data collection family.

The 21st EBP meeting and a LIFE EBP Reinforcement workshop bring together 36 participants from 18 countries in Podgorica, Montenegro

10/12/2024

One of the objectives of the LIFE EBP Reinforcement project is to increase the quantity and quality of bird observations from SE Europe, therefore, we took this opportunity to set up a regular EBP meeting in the core area, in Podgorica, Montenegro. The meeting lasted for three days, from 28 till 30 October 2024, and was held in the building of the Ministry of Sustainable Development and Tourism, with our Montenegrin partners, CZIP, taking care of the logistics.

The first day was dedicated to the regular EBP meeting, where Gabriel Gargallo, EBP project coordinator, presented the last advances of the EBP project, after which we used the opportunity to present the progress on each work task of the ongoing LIFE EBP Reinforcement project to a larger EBP community. Finally, we finished with the update on the work done within the Bird Flu Radar presented by Ruud Foppen from SOVON.

We used the second day to talk in more details about specific work tasks and activities related to the LIFE project. Petr Voříšek from CSO, gave an overview of the standardised bird monitoring data received from the project partners within the International Census Plots (ICP), which also served as immediate feedback to the partners from SE Europe. From the overview it was clear that the partners have managed to exceed the number of pre-set ICP plots for the given year, and the session ended with a fruitful discussion of partners’ experience from the field and issues they faced, with potential solutions.

Afterwards, we moved to the workshop on EBP data flow implementation, where Gabriel Gargallo and David Martí from ICO gave an overview on the state of the connectivity of all EBP partners regarding the update on including the data for all bird species occdurring in Europe and the protocols information, as well as presenting the internal tool that partners use for this update. The situation of each partner is more diverse here, but it seems that all partners are on a good way to make this connection until the end of this year. Marc Illa from ICO also talked about taxonomy mapping and clearing any doubts with partners on the instructions they received previously.

Finally, we ended the second day with the workshop on sensitive species, by providing the overview of the questions on sensitive species partners answered in advance, and a proposal of how to deal with the sensitive species within the EBP project, followed by an open discussion.

The last day was dedicated to concluding the workshop on Regional Dynamization Campaign (RDC) by finalizing the campaign proposal and setting up final dates. The first part of the workshop was held on-line at the beginning of October, and we used the opportunity of this physical meeting to conclude the work to be done in the following year and a half within the RDC.

Overall, this meeting brought together 36 participants from 18 countries, as well as a lot of interesting discussions and conclusions that were much needed for the progress of the overall EBP project.

The Regional Dynamization Campaign (RDC) on-line workshop is approaching

26/09/2024

The Regional Dynamization Campaign (RDC) plays a crucial role in fulfilling one of the main objectives of the LIFE EBP Reinforcement project in boosting overall data collection in SE Europe, both through promotion of participating in on-line bird portals as well as collecting more structured data (e.g. complete lists). By this, we hope to create an environment where more people in the region will have a larger incentive to join the standard bird monitoring as well.

There are two main points of action within the RDC: organizing data collection challenges each season of the year and working directly with volunteers by organizing specific training courses.

The first step towards defining the goals and objectives of the campaign is an on-line workshop that will be held during 3 days’ time, from October 7th till October 9th. At the workshop, we expect attendance of partners from 13 countries of the region (Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Hungary, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia and Slovenia), that will be sharing their national experience and creating the future steps of the campaign together. During this time, we aim to establish the final design of the campaign, involving all the relevant local organizations to ensure that its main components are adequately fine-tuned to the local needs while keeping its necessary regional scope.

The workshop itself will be divided into 3 main topics arranged by each day. The first day will be dedicated to the data collection challenges, starting from the overall importance of the region for birds to the challenge design and experience in organizing challenges from other countries. We plan to finish with an open debate and input from partners on forming the challenge itself. The second day will be dedicated to training courses for volunteers. It will provide a good platform for sharing the already existing experience od partners, but also from a broader EBP community in training courses. We hope to define the specific needs of each partner and to produce a list and typology of courses to be conducted in each country. The final day will put focus on the communication strategy of the campaign, by providing the framework of communication strategy on a regional level and asking for input from partners on a national level. By this we should establish a coordinated way for communicating the RDC in each country by taking local needs into account.

In the preparation phase of the workshop, we hope it will be a fruitful meeting for partners, and a place of exchanging ideas and experience in order to fulfil our common goal in increasing the bird observation quality and quantity in SE Europe.

See the full programme here.

The EBP viewer maps may be showing some important gaps meanwhile the ongoing re-connectivity has not been completed

13/09/2024

We are currently re-connecting all portals to the EBP dataflow in order to add the information of all the species recorded in Europe and properly identify and characterize the data collected using specific or more standardized protocols. A process that will last until the very end of the year.

Often, for the portals to be re-connected, we have to stop temporally the ongoing data flow and re-upload the data up to 2010 and during this process the data may not be depicted in the maps totally or in part.

This is why, meanwhile the ongoing re-connectivity has not been completed, the EBP viewer maps may be showing some important gaps in some parts of Europe. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Note also that, despite we expect to have all new species data by the start of 2025, the EBP viewer will not be showing data of these species until spring 2026, once the new version of the EBP viewer is launched. In the meantime we will continue to show the data of the 137 species alreadyavailable in the viewer.

The EBP viewer will not be updated for some time due to major ongoing changes in the system

09/02/2024

Over the next few months, we will be making major changes to the EBP central database and automated data flow infrastructure.

Unfortunately, this work will temporarily interrupt the regular updating of the maps and graphics displayed in the EBP viewer, however, it is entirely necessary to improve and extend the system capabilities that are foreseen in the LIFE EBP reinforcement project and that will allow, during the course of this year, to include all bird species occurring in Europe in the EBP data flow, not only the current 137 species, and subsequently visualise their distribution patterns in a new version of the EBP viewer that will be launched in spring 2026.

This disruption will only affect the updates of the EBP viewer, the rest of the tool will continue to function normally. Sorry for the inconvenience.

The 20th EBP meeting brings together 49 people from 21 different countries in Brno (Czech Republic)

29/12/2023

The meeting was organized by the Czech Society for Ornithology (CSO) and took place during November 20-21 at the Institute of Vertebrate Biology of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Brno.

This time, the EBP meeting had a different format than previous ones as it included a LIFE EBP Reinforcement workshop aimed to support the completion of the EBP data flow by means of adding all the species recorded in Europe and by properly identifying and characterizing all data submitted using particular protocols (e.g. standard monitoring projects, nocmig, project specific field protocols, etc). Moreover, just after this meeting, during November 22-25, a second LIFE EBP Reinforcement workshop was organized at the same place, though this one only was open to the partners of the seven target countries of the LIFE project in SE Europe (Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro and Serbia).

The participants in front of the Institute of Vertebrate Biology of the Czech Academy of Sciences

The meeting was attended by 49 persons from 21 different countries and started on Monday afternoon with the welcoming words of Jan Zukal, director of the Institute of Vertebrate Biology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and Verena Keller, chair of the EBCC.

Then the representatives of Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia and Malta gave a brief presentation about each organization and a description of their needs regarding standard bird monitoring/online bird portals and how they would like to meet these needs thanks to the LIFE project.

The session continued with an overview of the LIFE EBP Reinforcement project, the EBBA2 Live Farmland project and the International Census Plots (ICP) project and finished talking about the protocols table and its relevance to properly identify and characterize all data submitted using more elaborate data collection procedures (e.g. standard monitoring projects, nocmig, project specific field protocols, etc).

The meeting was attended by 49 persons from 21 different countries

The Tuesday morning session started with an overview about the EBP data standard and the EBP data flow system and with the presentation of the overall approach that will be followed to add the data of the new species and the protocols information (timings, how to deal with new/old data, etc) to the EBP data flow (see LIFE WorPackage 8 for more information on this task).

The morning session finished discussing about taxonomy. It was agreed that, to develop the LIFE WorPackage 8, the EBP would follow the last version of the HBW-BirdLife taxonomy (version 8.0). It was stressed that this work will also require the mapping of the taxonomy of each local portal to the EBP one, a work that will be carried out by each local portal with the support of the EBP coordination team.

The first part of the Tuesday afternoon session was devoted to cover some EBP topics that were less directly related to the LIFE project. This included a brief update of the EBP project and the new EFSA-EBP-EURING contract and the presentation of one of the first outputs of this work: the implementation of the Bird Flu Radar in the new Migration Mapping Tool and the creation of an automatic alert system.

The session continued with the presentation of the results of a paper that analysed the geographical patterns of arrival of 30 common migrant bird species using EBP data and the GBIF Humboldt extension, an extension of the GBIF code that will allow GBIF to correctly store and handle the datasets collected using more structured protocols (e.g. complete lists).

Coffee breaks gave plenty of space to continue conversations

Finally, it was commented that the next in-person EBP meeting will take place in SE Europe in autumn 2024, most probably October. As the one taking place in Brno, it was pointed out that this meeting will be again a combination of a regular EBP meeting a various LIFE EBP Reinforcement workshops (two linked to the EBP viewer and, thus, of overall interest to the EBP community, and one focused on the partners of SE Europe and the regional dynamization campaign that will be organized in that area in 2025 and 2026).

The meeting finalised with a session devoted to discuss the use of data collected outside primary areas by EBP and the local partners. Here, representatives from Observation.org, eBird, Ornitho and Trektellen explained which were the technical and legal possibilities of these portals in terms of sharing observations and personal information with the local partners.

A grant to further improve the capabilities of the EBP project

17/07/2023

A new LIFE grant will help to further improve the capabilities of the EBP project during the next years.

The project, entitled “Improving the capabilities of the EuroBirdPortal project in order to boost its contribution towards EU policy objectives under the Birds Directive and the 2030 Biodiversity Strategy", in short "LIFE EBP reinforcement" (project 101104367 — LIFE22-PLP-ES-EBP reinforcement), main aim is to improve the quantity and quality of bird-related data in Europe to enhance their contribution to EU policy objectives under the EU Birds Directive and the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030.

To do so, the EBP will closely work with the two other EBCC projects (the European Breeding Bird Atlas 2 (EBBA2) and the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS)), as the combination of their different datasets and know-how will certainly increase the overall value of the policy relevant outputs.

Specifically, the main objectives of project are:

1) Improving the geographical coverage and the overall quality of the bird-related data collected in Europe by increasing participation, data collection and use of more structured data collection protocols, particularly, in SE and E Europe.

2) Adding all the species recorded in Europe to the EuroBirdPortal (EBP) data flow making full use of the EBP data standard and updating the EBP viewer accordingly.

3) Producing two demonstrative outputs that showcase how the improved capabilities of the EBP project could be applied to help implement key EU Biodiversity Strategy goals.

The project has a duration of three years and a half (July 2023 to December 2026) and an overall cost of 1.110.605,44 €, of which 90% (999.544,89 €) are financed by the European Union.

The LIFE EBP reinforcement will be coordinated by the Ecological and Forestry Applications Research Centre (CREAF) and has nine associated beneficiaries: the Catalan Ornithological Institute (ICO), the Czech Society for Ornithology (CSO), the Dutch Centre for Field Ornithology (SOVON), the Bulgarian Society for the Protection of Birds (BSPB), the Macedonian Ecological Society (MES), the Ornithological society "Naše ptice" (OD NASE PTICE), the Romanian Ornithological Society (SOR), the Center for Protection and Research of birds of Montenegro (CZIP) and the Bird Protection and Study Society of Serbia (BPSSS).

Celebrating World Migratory Bird Day 2019

11/05/2019

Today is World Migratory Bird Day 2019! A perfect moment to to have a look at the migration patterns of 105 different bird species or follow Swallows, Cuckoos or your favourite bird as they undertake their amazing journeys through Europe at the LIVE EBP viewer.

This year, the emphasis for World Migratory Bird Day is on plastics. A real threat to birds everywhere. Find out how you can help by visiting www.worldmigratorybirdday.org.

Thanks to the EBP viewer we can see the patterns of migration of European birds better than ever

EBP features in Finish TV

25/04/2019

The EBP project has nicely featured today in MTV, one of the leading TV channels in Finland.

Our colleague Peter Uppstu, from BirdLife Suomi, has been talking about the project latests developments and the functionalities of the EBP viewer, but also about birds and birdwatching in general.

See the video and associated article in the MTV website here:

Tiira, the Finish online bird portal, is collecting c.4% of the whole EBP data.

Peter Uppstu talking about EBP in MTV

EBP maps have been used to visualize the arrival of the Barn Swallow to Finland

The 14th EBP meeting takes place at Évora, Potugal

15/04/2019

The 14th EBP meeting took place in Évora, Portugal, on April 8th 2019. Unlike previous meetings, the reunion was quite short (one morning only) but benefited from the fact that many people were attending the Bird Numbers 2019 conference (which took place also in Évora and started the same day in the afternoon).

A total of 22 persons from 12 different countries attended the event this time.

The meeting took place at the wonderful senate room of Colégio do Espírito Santo, University of Évora

The state of the implementation of the automated data flow and the launch of the LIVE EBP viewer were two of the key points of the agenda. The progress made during the last months has been amazing and by the time of launching 15 online portals and more than 99% of the whole EBP data will be connected automatically on a daily basis.

The lessons learnt and considerations for future developments (e.g. addition of new species) were also discused. The option to compare LIVE maps with previous year data will be impleted most probably before summer.

An overview on the progress of the LIFE EBP project, which will be ending on April 15th, was also presented.

Another important point in the agenda was related to the future developments of the project and the options for funding.

In particular, the H2020 funding opportunities seemed to be particularly well suited for our initiative. One of the calls, "SC5-33-2020: Monitoring ecosystems through research, innovation and technology", is directed to proposals that shall design an EU-wide framework for monitoring biodiversity and ecosystem services and, therefore may be particularly interesting for us. However, such an application would require a very strong consortium and, most probably, involve more than a single EBCC project.

The options to collaborate with ENETWILD/EFSA were also discussed. In fact, a meeting with these organizations was going to take place on April 9th (also at Bird Numbers 2019) in order to explore a possible collaboration in the framework of the EFSA initiative to collate and analyze spatial and temporal distribution information on wild birds relevant to Avian Influenza in Europe.

Finally, it was stressed that the EBP should define which are the specific products that could realistically deliver in the short/mid term since this would be essential when seeking the proper funding/collaboration at the EU level.

The Russian colleagues gave a short talk about their online bird portal: ru-birds

Shortly after the general EBP meeting, on April 10th, eight persons participated in the fifth meeting of the LIFE EBP coordination team.