Avian responses to climate extremes: insights into abundance curves and species sensitivity using the UK Breeding Bird Survey

Climate change poses a major threat to biodiversity, not only because of increasing temperatures, but also because of more frequent and more severe extreme weather, so we need to understand how species may be affected by this. The study looks at the effects of climate extremes on British bird populations and contributes to understanding how the impacts of climate change on biodiversity can be mitigated.

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Behavioural responses of Sandwich terns following the construction of offshore wind farms

GPS tracking sheds light on the ‘barrier effects’ of offshore wind farms, where renewable energy developments may act as obstacles that impede the movements of seabirds to and from their colonies during the breeding season, or on migration.

Extended moult phenology models improve inferences about moult duration and timing

Moult is an essential but understudied life-history event in birds, and one that is difficult to study with current statistical approaches. This paper presents an extended modelling framework that should remove barriers to modelling the phenology of moult.

Natural body size variation in seabirds provides a fundamental challenge for flight height determination by single-camera photgrammetry. A comment on Humphries et al. 2023

Determining flight heights for seabirds is a crucial prerequisite for understanding collision risks associated with offshore wind farms, but obtaining these can be challenging. This comment addresses concerns over the workflow proposed by Humphries et al. (2023)

Remote tracking unveils intercontinental movements of nomadic Short-eared Owls Asio flammeus with implications for resource tracking by irruptive specialist predators

Birds may exhibit a range of different movement patterns, from the dispersal that takes them away from the nest in which they were raised, through to annual migrations between breeding and wintering areas located thousands of miles apart. Some of these movements are more difficult to study than others, and this is particularly true for those species that are nomadic in their behaviour. International research led by BTO has revealed that Short-eared Owls make astonishing nomadic migrations between nest sites as far apart as Scotland and Arctic Russia.

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