Article impact statement: Protected areas are needed to facilitate waterbird distribution change in response to climate warming in the Western Palearctic.

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From 2003From -2006, research on the breeding distribution of the white-tailed eagle (Haliaeetus albicilla) was conducted in Croatia in order to assess the size of the national population. In 125 locations, clear signs of breeding activity were found. An additional 10 presumably active territories were detected but it was not possible to locate the exact position of the nests and confirm the breeding. Based on this, it is concluded that the national breeding population is not less than 135 breeding pairs. The present distribution can be compared with previous reports with the exception of the area along the Ilova and Lonja rivers that have never been reported as an important breeding site. Analysis of the characteristics of 138 nest positions as well as preferences/avoidance of specific structural features were performed. The results showed that white-tailed eagles prefer to build their nests on pedunculate oaks, narrow-leafed ash and white poplars with the greatest preference for mature trees with a diameter above 92.5 cm. The minimal distance between two active pairs was 348 meters. More than 50% of the national population breed less than two km from a large water area and 95% of the population less than four km. More than 95% of the population breed at altitudes lower than 140 m above sea level and are further than one km away from the nearest human settlement, regardless of the availability of forests. According to several parameters (distance to a large water area, elevation, forest presence, distance to the nearest settlement, distance to highways and railways) geographic information system (GIS) helped to determine potential white-tailed eagle breeding areas.

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European populations of the white‐tailed eagle Haliaeetus albicilla suffered a drastic decline during the 20th century. In many countries, only a few dozen breeding pairs survived or the species disappeared completely. By today, the populations have recovered, naturally or through restocking (e.g. in Scotland or the Czech Republic). In the Carpathian Basin, which is now a stronghold in southern Europe for the species in the southern part of the distribution range with more than 500 breeding pairs, only about 50 pairs survived the bottleneck. This region provides important wintering places for individuals arriving from different regions of Eurasia. In the present study, we investigated 249 DNA samples from several European countries, using 11 microsatellites and mitochondrial control region sequences (499 bp), to answer two main questions: 1) did the Carpathian Basin population recover through local population expansion or is there a significant gene flow from more distant populations as well? 2) Does the Czech population show signs in its genetic structure of the restocking with birds of unknown origin? Our microsatellite data yielded three genetically separate lineages within Europe: northern, central and southern, the latter being present exclusively in the Carpathian Basin. Sequencing of mitochondrial DNA revealed that there is one haplotype (B12) which is not only exclusive to the Carpathian Basin but it is frequent in this population. Our results suggest that in accordance with the presumably philopatric behaviour of the species, recovery of the Carpathian Basin population was mainly local, but some of the wintering birds coming from the northern and central populations contributed to its genetic composition as well. We detected considerably higher proportions of northern birds within the Czech Republic compared to the neighbouring areas, making it likely that parents of the reintroduced birds came from northern populations.