| Summary: | The Mancha Húmeda Biosphere Reserve is the main group of inland shallow lakes in the Iberian Peninsula, where priority aquatic birds species for conservation in the Eu-ropean range breed and winter. Nowadays, this Reserve is among the most threatened wetland districts in Europe due to human activities, mainly agriculture; as, its status as a Biosphere Reserve is under revision since 2008. Monthly censuses were performed in 10 shallow lakes of the Biosphere Reserve from January 2007 to December 2010; results reported here focuse on the 12 species belonging to SPEC 1 and 2 categories. The results show that two species (Aythya ferina and Ciconia ciconia) are common and are widely distributed in the shallow lake studied; Aythya ferina is the specie that has shown the greatest population size. Four spe-cies (Ciconia nigra, Platalea leucorodia, Marmaronetta angustirostris and Numenius ar-quata) had an occasional presence and a low population size, using the shallow lake as a rest-ing place on their routes or movements dispersed. The remaining species (Vanellus vanellus, Limosa limosa, Tringa totanus and Philomachus pugnax) have few demographic effects, us-ing occasional the shallow lake and discontinuosly distributed. Five shallow lakes (Manjava-cas, Camino de Villafranca, La Veguilla, Salicor and Pedro Muñoz) presented sometime in the monitoring period of 8 to 10 species recorded, all of them under legal protection as a Na-ture Reserve. Water column depth, presence of shores, development of helophytes, presence of nutrients and hydrochemical characteristics seem to control the use of these wetlands by the different species.
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