Bird watchers and environmentalists now have a good news with the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS) coming up with the first bird atlas that gives a glimpse of how migratory animals connect continents, countries, sites and habitats.
The Eurasian-African Bird Migration Atlas brought out is the first part of a broader initiative to develop a global atlas of animal migration, for which the bird watchers can wait to soon come out.
The interactive Atlas is an online platform where data on the movements in time and space of millions of birds are mapped and analyed in the Eurasian-African flyway. Researchers from 10 different institutions and data gathered by over 50 different organizations contributed to the Atlas, which was developed by CMS partners, the European Union for Bird Ringing (EURING) and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour.
A major accomplishment of the Eurasian-African Bird Migration Atlas is to have collated, analyzed, and synthesized bird ringing data collected over more than 100 years on 300 species.
In addition, for over 100 of these species, the online mapping tool overlays movement patterns identified through bird ringing with tracks obtained through satellite transmitters, GPS-GSM tags or geo-locators. Together, they provide the most complete information available on the migration routes of these species,
VISUALIZATION TOOL
For CMS, whose main goal is to conserve migratory species throughout their migratory range and migration itself as a biological phenomenon, a detailed understanding of the different migratory systems and patterns across the different groups of migratory species is important to design and implement conservation strategies and actions. The new Atlas offers new insights into migration patterns at the species and population levels and into human-related issues affecting them across their migratory paths.
CMS Executive Secretary Amy Fraenkel said: “Knowledge of how animals move and migrate over time and space is crucial for improving our understanding and conservation efforts for migratory species. The Atlas will help decision makers in planning networks of sites managed for conservation purposes.”
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- Four research modules that provide analyses addressing different aspects of bird migration and relationships between man and birds.
- Another research module provides estimates, at the scale of EU territory, of the onset of return migration for many huntable species covered by the Birds Directive. The onset of return migration is critically important information to determine the start of the protection period in the year. The module could help reconcile discrepancies among data at a national level.
- The fourth module focuses on a large-scale and long-term analysis of patterns of intentional killing of birds. It describes the frequency and distribution of intentional killing across the whole Eurasian-African flyways and identifies areas of particularly intense legal or illegal harvesting, both in Europe and Africa.