European monitoring for raptors and owls: state of the art and future needs.

Sixty-four percent of the 56 raptor and owl species that occur in Europe have an unfavorable conservation status. As well as requiring conservation measures in their own right, raptors and owls function as useful sentinels of wider environmental "health," because they are widespread top predators, relatively easy to monitor, and sensitive to environmental changes at a range of geographical scales. At a time of global acknowledgment of an increasing speed of biodiversity loss, and new, forward-looking and related European Union biodiversity policy, there is an urgent need to improve coordination at a pan-European scale of national initiatives that seek to monitor raptor populations. Here we describe current initiatives that make a contribution to this aim, particularly the current "MEROS" program, the results of a questionnaire survey on the current state of national raptor monitoring across 22 BirdLife Partners in Europe, the challenges faced by any enhanced pan-European monitoring scheme for raptors, and some suggested pathways for efficiently tapping expertise to contribute to such an initiative.

The Scottish Raptor Monitoring Scheme: objectives, achievements in the first four years, and plans for future development.

The Scottish Raptor Monitoring Scheme (SRMS) comprises 7 partner organizations and was established in 2002 after i) the publication of the UK Government's Raptor Working Group Report that made recommendations for enhanced monitoring, ii) increased applied data needs (e.g., for site designation), and iii) concerns for the status of some species. The SRMS has 3 major objectives: i) to facilitate cooperation between parties; ii) to provide robust information on Scottish raptor populations by determining trends in numbers, range, survival, and productivity and understanding the causes of change; and iii) to maintain high and uniform standards for the collection, collation, auditing, and analysis of data and reporting of information. Data are collected for 19 species: 14 diurnal raptors, 4 owls, and 1 corvid, the Common Raven. Here we describe the development of the scheme, challenges, and achievements during its first 4 y, the nature and value of the data collected, and plans for the future.