ServiBirds: Quantitative assessment of the ecosystem services provided by native birds in Spain

Birds are key ecosystem-service providers because of the wide range of services in which they are involved, their outstanding mobility and large population sizes. However, we lack a comprehensive framework to evaluate the ecosystem services (ES) provided by bird species at large spatial scales. Here, we introduce ServiBirds, an innovative database meticulously designed to quantify the ES delivered by bird species, using Spain, a species-rich country, as our study model. The database describes the species-level value in 12 different provisioning, supporting/regulating and cultural ES for 378 bird species from 73 families. For each species, the supporting/regulating services were weighted by their field metabolic rate and their population size in Spain to have a more precise view of the current role of the species in such services. Birds provided many ES, especially aesthetic, ecotouristic, as outbreak controllers and as seed dispersers. The species providing more supporting/regulating services in Spain included some that provided several services such as the Eurasian Magpie Pica pica, the Common Blackbird Turdus merula and others that were specialist in providing a single service such as the Griffon Vulture Gyps fulvus. For the cultural services, the top species were those providing many services such as the Red-legged Partridge Alectoris rufa, the Golden Eagle Aquila chrysaetos or the European Goldfinch Carduelis carduelis. Our study underlines the important role that birds play for ecosystem conservation and for human wellbeing. Moreover, the proposed framework can be adapted to other regions, and even taxonomic groups. We hope this study acts as a catalyst to better understand and for evaluating the ES provided by birds, thereby being used as a tool for bird conservation and ecosystem management.

There are two datasets:
Servibirds: Values of the ecosystem services and the weights used in the studyData origin: Information on the source data for some ecosystem services