130925-studie-wildlife-comeback-in-europe

managed grasslands and since the 1950s they feed
on sugar beet in winter [1] .
In Svalbard, they nest on rocky outcrops, steep
river gorges and islands. They forage in damp
sedge-meadows. During migration across Norway
in spring, they used to graze on saltmarshes and
fens, but since the 1980s they now almost exclusively
graze on managed grasslands. In Denmark,
they forage in stubbles for spilt grain, but also on
grassland and increasingly, notably in winter, on
autumn-sown cereals. At the wintering grounds in
the Netherlands and Belgium, they mainly graze
on grasslands [1] .
Legal protection and conservation status
The Pink-footed goose is listed in Annex II of the EU
Birds Directive, Annex III of the Bern Convention,
and Annex II of the Convention on Migratory
Species, under which both populations are covered
by the African-Eurasian Waterbird Agreement
(AEWA), listed in Column A (category 2a for the East
Greenland & Iceland/UK population and category 1
for the Svalbard/North-west Europe population) in
the AEWA Action Plan [4, 5] .
Abundance:
current status and changes
There are no data on the species before the
20th century, as the Pink-footed goose was
formerly confused with the Bean goose (Anser
No. of individuals
400,000
350,000
300,000
250,000
200,000
150,000
100,000
50,000
0
1951
1954
1957
1960
1963
1966
1969
1972
1975
1978
1981
1984
1987
1990
1993
1996
1999
2002
2005
2008
2011
fabalis) [2] . Systematic autumn counts in Scotland
provide an accurate assessment of the size of
the Iceland/Greenland population [2] . The species
was considered to be a scarce winter visitor in
the past [2] , but the population size has increased
from about 8,500 individuals in 1951 to more than
350,000 individuals in 2013 [9] . The rate of increase
was highest in the 1980s [2] (Figure 1).
The Svalbard population was estimated to
number 10,000–12,000 individuals in the 1930s
and 1950s [3] . By the mid-1960s, when systematic
autumn counts began, the population had
increased to 15,000–18,000 [3, 10] . The increasing
trends continued and by 2012, the population had
reached 81,600 individuals [10] (Figure 1).
Figure 1.
Number of
Pink-footed
geese since 1951,
showing the
Svalbard, Iceland
and Greenland
populations
separately [9, 10] .
Figure 2.
Current breeding
and wintering/
staging distribution
of Pink-footed
goose in Europe and
historical breeding
distribution in Iceland
and Svalbard in the
1950s [11] and 1980s [12] .
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