Biodiversity has been on the decline in Central Europe’s farmland for years. Unlike in the era of smaller farms and traditional polyculture farming, today’s agricultural practices are poorly structured and overwhelmingly support monocultures, leaving very little habitat for wild animal and plant species. This is an area in which digitisation opens up a number of possibilities for sustainable development. For this reason, the Landespflege Freiburg Institute for Conservation Ecology and Landscape Management is working together closely with the Wurzach Marsh Conservation Centre and with DBU funding to develop what are known as decision support systems.
“Modern agricultural practices are decisive for large portions of the cultivated landscape, and that has a huge impact on the biodiversity of the wild animal and plant species,” explains project manager Thomas Kaphegyi from Landespflege Freiburg. “If too many nutrients leach into the ground water from agricultural areas, or make their way into neighbouring bodies of water, that can result in severe strain on these habitats and seriously affect communities of species. For that reason, it’s important to understand where nutrients are leached out of the agricultural landscape in greater quantities, and how this can be influenced by altering the way we farm.”
The catchment area of the Wurzach Basin was selected as a model region. The Wurzach Marsh is located within the Wurzach Basin, and is one of the largest nature reserves in southern Germany. Its core, which remains largely untouched, is considered one of the largest interconnected, intact upland moors in Central Europe. Horst Weisser, Head of the Wurzach Marsh Conservation Centre: “You can think about the water catchment area as a bowl. The water flows from the edges down to the bottom. And our moor complex is located in the bottom of the bowl.”
A computerised digital elevation model is used to depict individual streams and their confluences in order to detect trouble areas. This makes it possible to derive predictions for the way the habitat will develop in the future when various measures are introduced. Using the computer-aided decision support system, cost-benefit analyses can be created before the corresponding measures are introduced.
DBU Press Release on this topic
