Chris van Turnhout, Arjan Boele, Jan-Willem Vergeer & Tom van der Meij (2024) The first forty years of the Dutch breeding bird monitoring program. LIMOSA 97 (4): 175-186.

In 2023, the Dutch breeding bird monitoring program had been running for 40 years. Although essentially the field work method has remained the same since the start in 1984 (territory mapping), many aspects regarding management and implementation of the scheme have changed. In this paper we give an overview of the most important developments, key results and future challenges of national bird monitoring. Topics are the extension of monitoring goals (e.g. from common species only to also rare and colonial breeding birds, from national trends only to also regional and site-specific trends), refinements in field work interpretation, implementation and integration of additional subschemes in hitherto underrepresented habitats, participation and facilitation of volunteer observers, trend analyses methods including correction for observer biases, e.g. by implementing a post-hoc stratification and weighting procedure, and the future possibilities of adopting new field work techniques such as drones and automated acoustic monitoring.

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