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New systematic data: 20 million winter birds over 50 years

One aim of SBDI is to make systematically collected biodiversity data available for researchers. A new long-term dataset on birds wintering in Sweden has now been published, adding to previous datasets of Swedish breeding birds. All data originate from systematic environmental monitoring schemes.

Systematic counts of birds in Sweden have been carried out since the 1960s. The counts are run by the Swedish Bird Survey (“Svensk Fågeltaxering”) at the Department of Biology, Lund University, on behalf of the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency. The vast majority of counts are carried out by skilled volunteers, presently around 750 persons per year. Whereas the main objective is to follow the fate of the Swedish bird fauna, the nature of the data also makes them highly suitable for both basic and applied research. Several datasets from counts carried out during the breeding season have already been published on GBIF. The latest dataset to be made public was the winter point counts, that have been run uninterrupted since the winter 1975/1976. More than 840 000 occurrences of 20 million birds are included, originating from between 500 and 1500 per winter, from October to March.

Link to dataset:  https://www.gbif.org/dataset/78d97723-3ac0-460f-9d9e-b8e603489883

Contact: Åke Lindström ake.lindstrom@biol.lu.se