Retirement of Hans Schmid at the Swiss Ornithological Institute

At the end of August, Hans Schmid retired after working at the Swiss Ornithological Institute for 37 years. Hans joined the institute in 1986, where he supported Niklaus Zbinden in various monitoring projects. His first big project was the coordination of the second national breeding bird atlas, published in 1998. Based on the experience with simplified territory mapping used for the atlas, the Swiss Common Bird Monitoring project was set up in 1999. From the beginning and up to this year, Hans coordinated this project, always motivating volunteers and looking for improvements on the technical side. From the tedious analysis of territories by hand, Hans developed the semi-automatic “Terrimap”, a program which could be downloaded from a CD, later available as an online version, and eventually “Autoterri”, allowing automatic determination of territories for many species. Of course, this was done in collaboration with the team, but Hans was definitely the leader in these developments. Hans also quickly saw the potential of the online platform ornitho, developed by Gaëtan Delaloye first for the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and established it as the national platform ornitho.ch in 2007. It took not long for Hans to realise the potential of combining ornitho and other platforms at the European level. He presented his ideas at the EBCC conference in Cáceres in 2010 in a talk titled “Do we need a European database for bird sightings, and if yes, what is the role of the EBCC?”. Hans further developed his idea with Gabriel Gargallo and the Ornitho International Steering Committee (which Hans set up and chaired for many years). This resulted in the formal start of the EuroBirdPortal (EBP) project in 2013. While Gabriel was appointed project coordinator, Hans chaired the working group, which was turned into a formal EBP committee in 2017.

Thus, Hans impersonated bird monitoring as not many others and can truly be named the “father of EBP”. The EBCC is very grateful for his ongoing engagement with European ornithology. We wish Hans all the best in his new phase of life, with many nice observations of birds, surely well recorded in ornitho across Europe.

Verena Keller