Vilm, 11.07.2019

The National Natural Heritage stands for the initiative of the Federal Government to exempt federal-owned land of high nature conservation value from privatisation and to transfer it free of charge to the federal states, nature conservation organisations.

Some of the NNE areas have remained with the Federal Government. A total of 156,000 hectares are currently protected as natural heritage sites; these are subject to high nature conservation requirements. The main conservation objectives with regard to national natural heritage areas subject to transfer include the conservation and development of natural woodland as well as management and use of valuable protected or endangered open countryside ecosystems.

 Monitoring is used to monitor and document the condition and development of the areas and their elements. In order to be able to provide reliable statements over long periods of time, core parameters are identified with reference to the objectives and recorded according to defined and standardised methods. The use of uniform methods guarantees the comparability of the data beyond the individual area. At the same time, the aim is to make monitoring as cost-extensive and simple as possible.

At the conference, the NNE monitoring concepts already developed for recording forest development and breeding birds as well as photo documentation were presented and initial experiences and results were exchanged. As a future module for NNE monitoring, butterfly surveys were discussed.

The opportunity to exchange information on questions of practical implementation, evaluation and storage of the data as well as the involvement of volunteers was used intensively. The conference contributions and discussion results will be summarised and published. The results of the workshop will be incorporated into a planned research project for the development of a comprehensive overall concept for monitoring on National Natural Heritage Sites. (Photo: Thomas Stephan / © German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation)