Skokholm Bird Observatory

The Skokholm Bird Observatory is a 1 km² island off the coast of Wales, UK. Since 1928, annual surveys of breeding birds on the island have been conducted.

Ecological Level: Community

Biome: Temperate

• Habitat: flat top island with grass and bracken (Lack, D. 1969. Population changes in the land birds of a small island. Journal of Animal Ecology 38:211-218)

Location: Wales (Lat/Long)

Spatial Scale of data: 1 km2 island

Timespan: 1929-1979

Frequency: annually. No description of sampling intensity within a year in data source (Williamson 1983; see below)

Observational/Experimental: Observational

Dataset Location: Williamson, M. 1983. The land-bird community of Skokholm: Ordination and Turnover. Oikos 41:378-384.

Data collection summary: There is no diescription of how data was collected, except that birds were only included in the data published in Williamson (1983) if there was evidence of breeding. Failed nests were taken as evidence of attemptde breeding.

Data Collected: Species, number of breeding pairs.

Issues:

• No data were collected from 1941-1945.
• Williamson (1983) reports that sometimes breeding for a species was recorded but the number of pairs was not. In those cases, the number of pairs was interpolated linearly from the number of pairs in the year before and after the missing data. The inpterpolated data is indicated with italics in the data tbale in Williamson (1983)