Birds in Europe are declining, with an average of 20 million disappearing each year. Researchers blame agricultural intensification as the main cause.
They used a dataset unprecedented in its scope: 37 years of observations from 20,000 ecological monitoring sites in 28 European countries, for 170 species. The decline is marked in species such as the grey flycatcher (-63%) or the famous house sparrow (-64%) The number of forest birds has decreased by 18%, a drop of 28% for urban birds and even 57% for birds in agricultural areas.