The Nest Record Scheme (NRS) gathers vital information on the breeding success of Britain’s birds by asking volunteers to find and follow the progress of individual birds’ nests.
How to get involved
To monitor some specially protected species, it’s necessary to obtain a Schedule 1 permit in addition to registering as a nest recorder.
As with all British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) surveys, the welfare of the birds comes first, and therefore all nest recorders follow the NRS Code of Conduct, a protocol designed to ensure that monitoring a nest does not influence its outcome.
The data collected for NRS are used to produce trends in breeding performance, which help us to identify species that may be declining because of problems at the nesting stage. These trends are updated every year and published in the BirdTrends report. NRS data also allow us to measure the impacts of pressures such as climate change on bird productivity. Please see the results page for more information.
Related info
A list of useful publications can be found here: http://www.bto.org/volunteer-surveys/nrs/publications