Bird monitoring in Germany has until now been organised on a Land level with consequent problems of standardisation and coordination on a federal basis.

On Saturday the 16^th of August 2003, the German Bird Monitoring Trust [Stiftung "Vogelmonitoring Deutschland"] officially came into being at a founding meeting in Chemnitz, Saxony. Among the speakers at this event were the renowned producer of nature films Prof. Heinz Sielmann, Ms. Anette Doerpinghaus (German Institute for Nature Protection), Dr. H.-G. Bauer (German Advisory Board for Bird Protection), Prof. F. Bairlein (German Ornithological Society) as well as guests from The United Kingdom (Prof. J. Greenwood, BTO) and Switzerland (Niklaus Zbinden, Swiss Bird Observatory, Sempach).The Trust, the aim of which is to promote bird monitoring activities in Germany, has 37 founding members including the ornithological societies of all the German Laender.

The establishment of this trust, which owes much to the influence to the British Trust for Ornithology; will do much in the long term to provide accurate and valuable information on bird populations and their habitats in Germany. This will be of general benefit to European bird species as Germany lies centrally in the European land mass and provides not only important breeding areas for European birds; but has many important resting and refuelling locations for migrants.

The website (at present mainly in German) at http://www.vogelmonitoring.de provides information on bird monitoring activity in Germany including plans and programmes of the relevant Federal and Land organisations; and projects being run by professional societies, associations and working groups. An oversight into the current state of affairs can be gained from the English summaries of the opening addresses at the Steckby conference  held in September 2002. (Click on "English") More detailed information in German can be found in the full papers which can be downloaded as .pdf documents from the site.

David Conlin