Using citizen science data to inform the question of farming and biodiversity: farmland birds in Wallonia as a showcase by Jean-Yves Paquet

The "Farmland Bird Index" is widely used as a proxy to assess the biodiversity status of agricultural landscapes in Europe. This official indicator is calculated from long-term breeding birds monitoring data, collected by dedicated volunteer birdwatchers. In Wallonia, this monitoring scheme is coordinated by Aves-Natagora since 1990. In this seminar, we will explain how these data are collected, how population trends are derived from them and what this synthetic indicator really means. We will also explore some other results obtained from this dataset that goes beyond a simple state indicator, and contribute to better elucidate which are the driving factors of the farmland biodiversity changes, and how we can reverse a downing curve.