Dr Petr Vorisek
Dr Petr Vorisek is based at the Czech Society of Ornithology (CSO) in Prague. Since first being appointed to the role of Pan European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS) coordinator more than ten years ago, Petr has been an active and high‐profile leader. Through many connections facilitated by Petr, this scheme is now established as a shining example of European cooperation in biodiversity conservation. In PECBMS, bird population trends are collected from 27 contributing countries, and through bespoke analytical procedures that take into account national population sizes and different time series, are aggregated into Pan‐European species population trends and Pan‐European bird indicators used by the European Commission.
Although this has been a team effort, much of its success is owed to Petr’s leadership. This has encompassed frequent meetings with the funders, running training courses all over Europe, organising annual workshops, and the production of the required deliverables – the high-profile European bird indicators and species trends published annually.
Petr has proved particularly adept in working with NGOs and people in eastern Europe where his outgoing personality and expertise in Russian as well as other languages has proved invaluable, as well as in the west. Petr has also been responsible for communicating the value of these data in other contexts, to the EBCC Board on which he sits as Observer, governments, conservationists and academics on a wide range of topics. He has fought to obtain funds for a PECBMS Research Officer, to undertake bespoke research relevant to conservation policies in Europe.
In recent years, Petr has also taken on the mammoth task of coordinating the fieldwork for the EBCC’s second European Breeding Bird Atlas, helping to develop the methodologies, running training courses and atlasing expeditions throughout countries in eastern and southern Europe, and working closely with colleagues in Switzerland and Barcelona on other aspects of this huge project.