General approach
Smoothing population trends
Years used for analysis
Confidence limits and statistical testing
Data-deficient species

General approach

The alert system used within this report is designed to draw attention to developing population declines that may be of conservation concern, and has been described in detail by Baillie & Rehfisch (2006). It also identifies cases where long-term declines have reversed, leading to an improvement in conservation status. It must be stressed that the alerts and reversals reported here are advisory and do not supersede the agreed, longer-term UK conservation listings (Eaton et al. 2015; see PSoB pages). They are based on similar criteria to Birds of Conservation Concern, however, and so provide an indication of likely changes at future revisions.

The system is based on statistical analyses of the population trend data for individual species. Alerts seek to identify rapid declines (>50%) and moderate declines (>25% but <50%). These declines are measured over a number of time-scales, depending on the availability of data – the full length of the available time series, and the most recent 25 years, 10 years and five years for which change can be estimated. The conservation emphasis is particularly on the longer periods, but short-term changes help to separate declines that are continuing – or accelerating – from those that have ceased or reversed.

The alerts are calculated annually using standard automated procedures. Where species are at the margin of two categories (e.g. a decline of about 25%) they may raise alerts in some years but not others or, if around 50%, different levels of alert in different years.

Data for some species might be biased, owing to possibly unrepresentative monitoring, or imprecise, owing to small sample sizes. Because these data often provide the only information that is available, our general approach is to report all the alerts raised but to flag up clearly any deficiencies in the data.

Smoothing population trends

Bird populations typically show long-term changes that are complex and do not follow simple mathematical trajectories. In addition to the long-term trends, annual population indices also show short-term fluctuations resulting from a combination of natural population variability and statistical error. We use smoothing techniques that aim to extract the long-term pattern of population change, without forcing it to follow any particular shape (such as a straight line or a polynomial curve). These methods remove most of the effects of short-term fluctuations, including natural year-to-year variability, so that the long-term trend is revealed more clearly.

Technical details available here

Years used for analysis

Once a smoothed population trend has been calculated, change measures are calculated from the ratio of the smoothed population indices for the two years of interest. Population indices for the first and last years of a smoothed time series are less reliable than the others, and so we always drop them before calculating alerts. Because the latest year is not included, the alerts are therefore less up-to-date than they could be, but fewer false alarms are generated. The latest year's data points do contribute, however, to the smoothed curve and are dropped only after the smoothing has taken place.

The time it takes BTO to collate and analyse each year's intake of bird monitoring data is another factor affecting the years that can be included in these analyses. Full analyses of data sets are not usually all available until 12–15 months after the end of a particular breeding season. Thus for a report prepared in year x (e.g. 2019) we have analyses of monitoring data up to year x-1 (e.g. 2018). As we drop the final year of the smoothed time series, we report here on change measures up to year x-2 (e.g. 2017).

Long-term changes for most of the species included in this report are calculated from joint Common Birds Census and Breeding Bird Survey data (CBC/BBS indices), with population changes calculated back to 1967.

Confidence limits and statistical testing

We show 90% confidence limits for population change measures wherever possible. Any decline where the confidence interval does not overlap zero (no change) is regarded as statistically significant and will trigger an alert if it is of sufficient magnitude. Note that, because we are seeking to detect only declines, we are using a one-tailed test – with a P value of 0.05. These confidence limits therefore do not indicate whether increases are statistically significant.

The graphs of population trends show 85% confidence limits because these allow an approximate visual test of whether the difference between the index values for any two given years is statistically significant: if the index values for two given years are assumed to be independent, and normally distributed with standard errors of comparable size (standard errors differing by a factor of up to about 2 are quite acceptable), then to a good approximation the difference between them is significant at the 5% level if there is no overlap in their 85% confidence intervals (Buckland et al. 1992, Anganuzzi 1993). This test is fairly robust, and the independence assumption is reasonable if the years are well separated.

Data-deficient species

There is uncertainty about the reliability of the results for some species, either because data may be unrepresentative or because they are based on a very small sample of plots. In these cases the cause of the uncertainty is recorded in the comment column of the population change table.

Unrepresentative data

In this report we present joint UK or England CBC/BBS trends only if there was no substantial or statistical difference between the trends from the two schemes over the period when they ran in parallel (Freeman et al. 2007a). Thus, since BBS results are drawn from a random sample, the trends are always considered to be representative of the region concerned.

For CBC data representativeness was assessed using the criteria developed by Gibbons et al. (1993). Data from the 1988–91 Breeding Atlas were used to compare the average abundance of a given species in 10-km squares with and without CBC plots. If average abundance is higher in squares without CBC plots, it is likely that much of the population is not well sampled by the CBC. In past reports, CBC data for such species were labelled as "unrepresentative". Where there are insufficient data to undertake such calculations, expert opinion was used instead.

Sample size

Sample size is assessed from the average number of plots contributing to the population indices for a given species in each year. A plot with a zero count would be included provided that the species had been recorded there in at least one year and that records for that plot were available for at least two years. Plots where a species has never been recorded do not enter the index calculations. These average sample sizes are shown in column four ('plots') of the population change tables. For CBC, WBS and CES, a mean of between 10 and 20 plots (when rounded to a whole number) is flagged as a small sample. For BBS indices for individual countries a mean in the range 30–40 plots is flagged as a small sample. UK BBS indices are presented only where samples reach at least 40 plots.