The wide geographical coverage of the MITO2000 project samples has been planned to describe the distribution of common
birds on the whole Italian territory, for the frst time since the breeding bird Atlas of the ‘80s, and to obtain semi-quantitative information on the breeding bird populations on a national scale. Because of these objectives, the survey was drawn with semi-independent randomized samples for each of the frst fve years, so as to increase year after year the coverage of the national territory. The sampling technique involved single visit, unlimited distance point counts, of 10 minutes duration. During the frst fve years of the project 25294 point
counts have been performed by 312 surveyors. On the whole 1343, 10 km sided UTM secondary survey units have been visited (at least
once, with at least 8 point counts), spread within 181, 50 km sided UTM survey primary units. A total of 271 species was detected, of
which 241 with (regular or irregular) breeding status according to the 2009 updated Italian check-list. For these 241 species, the number
of “estimated breeding pairs” amounts to 425636. Based on the collected sample, a semi-quantitative representation of bird distribution
has been drawn for a list of 104 “common” species, mainly belonging to the order Passeriformes or other ecologically closed groups. The
data are represented as average “abundance” (breeding pairs/10 point counts) of each species in each primary unit. The discussion is enriched with graphs related to the altitude distribution (breeding pairs/10 point counts for bands of 200 m) and distribution in key environmental CORINE categories (breeding pairs/10 point counts in intervals of 20% coverage). The full English version of the text will soon
be available on the project website (www.mito2000.it).