2024
Award Recipient: Dr. Renate van den Elzen

The DO-G’s “Ornithological Collections” Section is awarding this year’s Maria Koepcke Prize to Dr. Renate van den Elzen of Vienna for her extraordinary contributions to the further development, the visibility, and the study of bird collections, as well as for her commitment to the DO-G “Ornithological Collections” Section. Through her work, the award recipient has also highlighted the importance of collection-based research, thereby contributing to a greater appreciation of natural history collections.

Renate van den Elzen, a native of Vienna, began her studies in 1965 at the University of Vienna in the fields of zoology, botany, and psychology, which she completed with a doctoral dissertation on the foraging behavior of the bearded tit. From 1974 to 2012, she served as curator of the bird collection at the Museum Koenig in Bonn. This period was marked by significant changes in the substantive and strategic direction of the Bonn museum system, as a result of which the institution was able to establish itself as a research facility within the Leibniz Association. Renate van den Elzen played an active role in this process while continuing her own research in parallel. Her scientific activities were and remain diverse and are not limited to museum ornithology. Her work focuses on systematic and ecological studies of various finches and waxbills, often combined with fieldwork in sub-Saharan Africa. In addition, she addresses traditional collection-related topics, drawing on her extensive international network. For example, her extensive research on type specimens not only contributed to the two type catalogs of the Museum Koenig but also found its way into related publications by other museums. During her time as curator, Renate van den Elzen also established close ties with the University of Bonn, serving on numerous occasions as an advisor for a wide variety of biology theses written by Bonn students.

But the award recipient has also left her mark in non-academic science education: her contribution to the redesign of the ornithology section of the permanent exhibition at Museum Koenig in the early 2000s deserves special mention here. This highly diverse section of the exhibition ranged from aspects of avian systematics to ecological topics and presentations relevant to species conservation, thereby building a bridge between the specialized field of ornithology and the general public. Another hallmark of Ms. van den Elzen’s work is her frequent collaboration with bird keepers and breeders, which resulted in a series of publications, including handbooks that remain standard German-language works on bird keeping. After her retirement, she moved back to Vienna, where she continues her work in and for the bird collection of the Natural History Museum.

Renate van den Elzen has also rendered outstanding service within the DO-G, which she joined in 1971. Initially serving as secretary from 1990 to 1996, she served as the society’s second vice president from 2003 to 2009, becoming the first woman ever to hold an executive board position at the DO-G. She is also a member of the commission “German Names of the Birds of the World” and co-organized the DO-G’s 100th annual meeting in Bonn in 1988, which took place as a celebratory anniversary conference at the Museum Koenig. Of particular significance to the “Ornithological Collections” section is, of course, her long-standing service as its first spokesperson (2000–2012). She transformed the group into a forum for professional exchange among bird curators in German-speaking countries and, beyond that, for anyone interested in these collections. Through joint projects, she not only gave the section purpose and substance but also developed it into a true community. Particularly noteworthy are the creation of an overview of type specimens of birds in German collections as part of GBIF, as well as the completion of the handbook “Vögel vermessen” (“Measuring Birds”), which she played a key role in coordinating.

By awarding the Maria Koepcke Prize to Dr. Renate van den Elzen, the German Ornithological Society honors a highly deserving colleague whose decades of ornithological work exemplify cooperative scientific collection efforts and their dissemination.

On behalf of the jury, Dr
. Till Töpfer. Presented

at the 157th Annual Meeting of the DO-G, Vienna
, September 21, 2025.