The Arctic Species Trend Index: Migratory Birds Index

Abstract

This report aims to describe the broad-scale trends necessary for designing and targeting informed conservation strategies at the flyway level to address these reported declines. To do this, we examine abundance change in selected Arctic breeding bird species, incorporating information from both inside and outside the Arctic (Figure 1) to capture possible influences at different points during a species’ annual cycle. The inclusion of trend information from non-Arctic locations confers a number of other advantages: data are readily available from key sites where individuals congregate in large, easy-to-count flocks; and adding these data allows for better disaggregation of trends due to larger data set size, thus providing the opportunity to elucidate the regional differences that have already been reported in the literature (Zöckler et al. 2013). Importantly, this addition also makes sense politically as the selected species are dependent on interconnected sites across the globe, meaning that suitable and effective conservation strategies can only be devised through international collaboration.