2023-05-15 21:00:09
Wind turbines, urbanization, habitat loss, night lighting, climate change, hunting or even predation by cats. The multitude of potential causes for the collapse of European bird populations has long been one of the pretexts for political inaction. Published Monday, May 15 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the journal published by the American Academy of Sciences, European work on an unprecedented scale has largely dissipated the very convenient fog of “multifactoriality”. They manage to establish, for the first time, a general hierarchy of the causes of the decline of avian populations on the Old Continent and point to the use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers as the major factor, ahead of global warming.
“The considerable negative impact of agricultural intensification on birds has long been reported, particularly for farmland birds and insectivorous birds, but our study this time provides strong evidence of a direct effect and predominant farming practices across the continent”, write the authors. Clearly: the intensification of agriculture, indexed by the intensity of use of synthetic inputs (pesticides and fertilizers), is the major cause of the decline of many avian species present or not in agricultural areas.
The Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Ireland and France are the European countries where the intensification of agricultural practices has increased the most in recent years, according to the index constructed by the researchers.
The drop in bird abundance in Europe is dizzying. It reaches 25% for all the species monitored over the thirty-seven years of study, while taking into account increases in the numbers of species that proliferate in contact with human activities. In total, therefore, there are approximately 800 million fewer birds compared to forty years ago. For species restricted to agricultural plains, the fall, spectacular, reaches 60%. Numbers of birds in urban areas are declining on average by 28%, those in wooded areas by 18%.
Fluctuations of different pressures
To carry out their analysis, the researchers used the most exhaustive data available, from the pan-European monitoring program for common birds: more than 20,000 sites scattered in 28 European countries were monitored according to a standardized protocol and the presence of 170 different species has been regularly evaluated there.
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