2011
Award Recipient: Dr. Dieter Thomas Tietze

Dr. Dieter Thomas Tietze received
the 2011 Maria Koepcke Prize from the “Ornithological Collections” section of the German Ornithological Society for his collection-based research aimed at elucidating evolutionary and ecological questions regarding songbirds, particularly tree creepers, tree climbers, and coal tits.

The particular value of this research lies in its holistic approach—which is far too often neglected today—and its integrative analysis of a broad, i.e., as diverse as possible, data set. Dr. Tietze combines field studies with intensive work in research collections. In doing so, he integrates the classical methods of museum ornithology—such as morphology and taxonomy—with modern molecular and bioacoustic analyses.

For his work on tree creepers of the entire genus Certhia, he visited bird collections worldwide and compiled comprehensive sets of measurements of morphological characteristics from museum specimens. In a follow-up study to his tree creeper research, he included the tree climbers (genus Salpornis) in his investigations.

In his most recent study on coal tits, he was able to add important taxa to the phylogeny using ancient DNA sequencing from museum specimens. Genetic distances, along with morphometric traits and bioacoustic characteristics, served as a measure of time for tracking the progress of the speciation process and thus for determining whether populations should already be recognized as allospecies or must still be classified as subspecies.