2019
Award Recipient: Dr. Justin J.F.J. Jansen
The “Ornithological Collections” section of the DO-G is awarding this year’s Maria Koepcke Prize to Dr. Justin J.F.J. Jansen of Grave (Netherlands) for his in-depth work on the history of ornithology, particularly regarding the ornithological findings of the expedition led by the French navigator Nicolas-Thomas Baudin (1754–1803) in Australia.
Dr. Jansen is not a professional ornithologist; rather, he has pursued his ornithological studies—which he began in his early youth—in parallel with his professional career. He is a versatile and prolific author, as evidenced by over 100 ornithological publications to date. The range of topics he covers extends from avifauna and field ornithology to issues of bird identification and systematics, as well as the aforementioned topics in the history of ornithology, which have appeared with increasing frequency since the mid-2000s. These publications deal with historical bird and egg collections as well as biographies of collectors and scientists who, in turn, had a strong connection to bird collections themselves. His extensive work on the Baudin Expedition, which he submitted as his dissertation in 2018, is the result of numerous visits to scientific bird collections and archives in international museums, during which Dr. Jansen built a wide network of contacts and traced connections between institutions and individuals, which vividly illustrate the early global interconnections between field ornithology and collection ornithology.
Dr. Jansen has been a volunteer research associate at the renowned Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands, since 2014. The jury is convinced that Dr. Jansen will continue to make substantial contributions to collection-related topics in the future and, by awarding him the Maria Koepcke Prize, wishes to expressly honor his long-term and detailed research into topics in the history of ornithology.
On behalf of the jury, Dr. Till Töpfer
Presented at the 152nd Annual Meeting
Marburg, September 26, 2019
President of the DO-G, Dr
. Wolfgang Fiedler