The decline of ground-nesting birds in Europe: do we need to manage predation in addition to habitat?

Bird populations are declining globally with losses recorded in many European breeding birds. Habitat management measures have not resulted in a widespread reversal of these declines. We analysed national bird population trends from ten European countries (France, Hungary, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK) in relation to the species’ nesting strategy (‘ground-nesting’ or ‘other’), Annex I designation (‘designated’ or ‘not designated’) and association with agricultural habitats for breeding (‘associated’ or ‘not associated’). For each country in our dataset, we also defined the following factors: farming intensity; predator community complexity; and predator control effort. Our results showed additive effects of nesting strategy, designation, and breeding habitats on the likelihood of population decline. Ground-nesting birds were 86% more likely to decline than birds with other nesting strategies. Annex I designated species of the Birds D..., Many countries provide data to the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS). We explored the PECBMS web page and the links included therein for each country, to identify if national data on population trends for each species could be obtained. Finally, we obtained national trends data for 10 countries, namely France (FR), Hungary (HU), Ireland (IE), the Netherlands (NL), Poland (PL), Portugal (PT), Spain (ES), Sweden (SE), Switzerland (CH) and the UK (UK). Specifically, common bird species trends in France were obtained from the monitoring programs coordinated by the Natural History Museum (http://www.vigienature.fr/fr/resultats-especes-3367). These data provided a 20-year trend (1998-2018) for each species. Hungary data from the Monitoring Centre of the Hungarian Ornithological and Nature Conservation Association were available at https://mmm.mme.hu/charts/trends and provided species trends for the period 1999-2021. Data from Ireland were available at https://www.npws.ie/sit..., , # The decline of ground-nesting birds in Europe: do we need to manage predation in addition to habitat?

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.t1g1jwt9k](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.t1g1jwt9k)

The data consists of a single Excel file with three sheets. All details about the variables in the sheet are located in the sheet named \"Read Me\"

## Code/Software

All modelling was conducted in R version 4.2.1