Wildlife conservation policies directed at common and widespread, but declining, species are difficult to design and implement effectively, as multiple environmental changes are likely to contribute to population declines. Conservation actions ultimately aim to influence demographic rates, but targeting actions towards feasible improvements in these is challenging in widespread species with ranges that encompass a wide range of environmental conditions. Across Europe, sharp declines in the abundance of migratory landbirds have driven international calls for action, but actions that could feasibly contribute to population recovery have yet to be identified. Targeted actions to improve conditions on poor-quality sites could be an effective approach, but only if local conditions consistently influence local demography and hence population trends. Using long-term measures of abundance and demography of breeding birds at survey sites across Europe, we show that co-occurring species with differing migration behaviours have similar directions of local population trends and magnitudes of productivity, but not survival rates. Targeted actions to boost local productivity within Europe, alongside large-scale (non-targeted) environmental protection across non-breeding ranges, could therefore help address the urgent need to halt migrant landbird declines. Such demographic routes to recovery are likely to be increasingly needed to address global wildlife declines.

These are the mean site-level population trends for groups of migrant (arid and humid-zone) and resident species derived from the PECBMS data. We used data from 19 schemes in 17 countries covering 13,859 sites and 80 species collected between 1994 and 2013.

This dataset contains the site-level estimates of population change derived from the PECBMS data. We used data from 19 schemes in 17 countries covering 13,859 sites and 80 species collected between 1994 and 2013. It has 7 columns:

• Site: unique site id
• Trend: average population trend
• CIup: upper confidence interval of the average population trend
• CIlo: lower confidence interval of the average population trend
• Latitude: latitude of the site
• Longitude: longitude of the site
• Status: the migratory status (resident, arid or humid) of the trend