Population trends of common species nesting in Italy: 2000-2011

Abstract

Since 2000, the Mito2000 project aims to monitor populations of common Italian breeding species. Every year, chosen by means of a randomized design, a variable number of 10x10 km grid squares are surveyed, doing, for each of these, 15 point counts of 10 minutes length. On his twelfth year, 643 are the squares surveyed at least two times and therefore useful to estimate population trends (using the software Trim). At the beginning of the project, 103 target species were identified and now, for 87 of these, defined population trends are now available; in addition, defined trends are also available for other 30 non-target species. Grouping the target species according to their ecology, the results point out a clear decrease in farmland birds (FBI index), and even a greater decrease for the species of mountain grasslands (PM index); by contrast, woodland species index increases sharply (WBI index). These results agree well with the results of sibling projects in other European countries, confirming the known trends in the evolution of environmental systems, stressing the reliability of Mito2000 project for monitoring trends in a group of important biodiversity indicators, the breeding birds.