The Jury

Susanne Aigner

Susanne Aigner runs an ecology office in Carinthia. The ecologist specialised early on in the connections between vegetation and land management, especially alpine pasture management. She has been working in the area of conflict between nature conservation and agriculture for 25 years, including 14 years as Head of the Alpine Pasture Management and Natural Area Management Department at eb&p Umweltbüro GmbH in Klagenfurt. Susanne Aigner is particularly interested in grassland and its importance for biodiversity.

Max Albrecht

Max Albrecht studied landscape planning and worked in the Environment and Climate Protection Department of the Province of Vorarlberg. He was a member of the Austrian national working groups for international nature conservation issues and rural development and a member of the Austrian MAB National Committee. Max Albrecht was instrumental in the development of the Vorarlberg Meadow Championships, the Großes Walsertal Biosphere Reserve and the Vorarlberg Natura 2000 network.

Bernhard Krautzer

Bernhard Krautzer heads the Institute of Crop Production and Cultural Landscape at HBLFA Raumberg-Gumpenstein. Among other things, he has been working for many years on various scientific issues relating to the conservation and promotion of plant biodiversity in the cultural landscape, the extraction and production of regional wild plant seeds and their use for revegetation and recultivation after technical interventions.

Ursula Meiser-Meindl

Ursula Meiser-Meindl is an education manager for nature conservation and agriculture at LFI Upper Austria, where she designs and organises courses, seminars and training programmes for biodiversity and species diversity. She also organises the certificate courses ‘Nature on the Farm’, ‘Nature Education’ and ‘Herbal Pedagogy’, with the aim of strengthening the understanding of our nature according to the motto ‘Protecting through using’, as it is ultimately the basis of our existence. Ursula Meiser-Meindl is married, has three children and writes children's books about edible wild plants in her spare time.

Theresia Neuhofer

Theresia Neuhofer and her husband Karl run an organic farm in Straßwalchen in Salzburg, together with their daughter Isabella and son-in-law Lukas since 2019. The farm specialises in the production of organic hay milk, and they have had a free-range barn with outdoor runs and pasture grazing since 1993. Theresia Neuhofer was a chamber councillor at LK Salzburg from 2005 to 2020 and an active member of the BMK's national biodiversity commission from 2014 to 2021. She also represented Austrian organic farmers at EU level for four years on the Committee for Organic Farming in the Copa-Cogeca.

Florian Schipflinger

Florian Schipflinger and his wife run an organic farm in the Tyrolean municipality of Westendorf, specialising in hay milk production. The grassland farm with alpine pasture management has one to three-cut areas as well as hay meadows and mountain mowing. The farm has been involved in the WF monitoring project ‘Cutting time according to phenology’ for several years. Florian Schipflinger studied agriculture at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, specialising in animal production and grassland. For 14 years he was managing director of ARCHE Austria and breeding manager of the two autochthonous pig breeds Mangaliza and Turopolje pigs. ARCHE Austria is the umbrella organisation for all Austrian rare livestock breeds.

Barbara Steurer

Barbara Steurer studied landscape ecology and landscape planning and has been working in the Austrian Board of Trustees for Agricultural Engineering and Rural Development in the field of agriculture-nature conservation networking since 1992. She has been Managing Director of ÖKL together with Eva-Maria Munduch-Bader since 2020. Current projects in which she is currently active in the ÖKL's Rural Development division include ‘Diversity on my farm - We build(ed) for diversity’, ‘Species and forage diversity on alpine pastures’ and various WF monitoring projects in Austria.