We are thrilled to announce that Peter Harvey is the first recipient of our new President's Award, given in recognition of exceptional contributions by individual members towards the public understanding of arachnology. He was presented with his award, an original painting by Richard Lewington of the Pirate spider, Ero cambridgei, by BAS President, Bill Parker at the Wat Tyler Country Park in Essex.
A BAS member since 1982, Peter took on the role of National Organiser of the Spider Recording Scheme in 1999 when many records were still submitted on RA65 cards. He helped to drive the modernisation of the scheme, including the much admired website, with distribution maps and summary phenology and habitat preference data that are automatically updated as records are added. Peter continued to manage the Scheme, upload records, make changes and improvements to the website, as well as producing SRS News three times a year, until he stepped down from the role in 2021.
Peter (together with the late Dave Nellist and Mark Telfer) also edited the landmark 2002 Provisional Atlas of Spiders of Britain, contributing to many of the individual species accounts included in the Atlas and available on the SRS website. He tutored many spider identification courses, helped members with the ID of difficult species and authored many articles in the BAS Newsletter. Beyond the SRS, he remains a key volunteer with the Essex Field Club, which may partially explain why Essex has one of the largest county lists of spiders (currently 418 species) in Britain!