Long‐term conservation efforts at flyway scale can halt the population decline in a globally endangered migratory raptor

Abstract

AbstractMany threatened species require ongoing management, which is often funded through short project cycles. Evaluating whether the management is effective in protecting a species is important to inform future management investments. For migratory species, management may affect only part of a species' annual cycle, and reversing a population decline is challenging to achieve and demonstrate. Here, we evaluate whether conservation management projects funded by the European LIFE programme to safeguard a migratory vulture population achieved their major objective of stabilizing the target breeding population. Between 2012 and 2022, an international alliance of conservation organizations implemented multiple actions to reduce poisoning, direct persecution, and electrocution and collision with power lines along the Eastern Mediterranean flyway. We monitored breeding territories of the Balkan population of the globally endangered Egyptian Vulture Neophron percnopterus between 2006 and 2022, and tracked 60 young birds with GPS transmitters since 2010. We used these data to examine whether population growth rate and survival probability had increased since project implementation. The mean annual survival probability of adult territorial birds increased by 1.9% since 2014 from 0.937 to 0.955, and the monthly survival probability of wild juvenile birds increased by 9.7% from 0.833 to 0.914 since 2018. The population growth rate across the Balkans increased by 6.9% from 0.939 before 2018 to 1.005 since 2018. This indicates that the Egyptian Vulture population has remained stable for the past 5 years (2018–2022), but at a population size that is only half (105 adult territorial birds in 2022) than at the beginning of the time series (204 in 2006). We caution that ongoing management along the flyway and reinforcement are required to ensure that the Egyptian Vulture population on the Balkans can recover, but we show that flyway‐scale collaboration of direct conservation actions can have lasting benefits for migratory species.