How to resurrect big wildlife in Northern Germany!?

Between Hamburg Metropolitan Region and Denmark is the home of Stiftung Naturschutz Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’s largest Nature Conservation Foundation owning > 2 % of the whole federal state. Schleswig-Holsteins landscape... [ view full abstract ]

Between Hamburg Metropolitan Region and Denmark is the home of Stiftung Naturschutz Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’s largest Nature Conservation Foundation owning > 2 % of the whole federal state. Schleswig-Holsteins landscape is intensively used, highly dissected by major traffic routes and very poor of (semi-)natural areas, especially in the southern part. Here large mammals with a high conflict potential are present but mostly within fragmented populations (red deer) or recently re-establishing (wolves, beaver and otter). There are ongoing high public investments for the improvement and re-connection of their habitats, e.g. by means of the construction of fauna passages over motorways and the installation of habitat corridors: From 2006 on six fauna bridges were realised and different projects funded by the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN) were conducted to optimize and connect habitats surrounding three of the fauna bridges. Today we very well know, what must be done and how much money must be spent for the defragmentation of landscapes as a key management strategy for the survival of big wildlife:

• The installation of fauna passages at the most important places is needed, each of them costs 2.5 – 5 Mio €.
• The purchase or at least protection of land and additional conservation actions are needed to optimize and reconnect habitats for most demanding species, according to our experiences it costs at least another 1 Mio € at each fauna passage.
• Information of local society is essential for the increase of acceptance and finally for the willingness to sell private land for conservation purposes.

In the northern part of the federal state the nature conservation foundation owns several thousand hectares of semi-natural biotopes and re-wildering areas being surrounded by farmland and forests, where large mammals can cause serious damages. In this region big wildlife was completely extinct for many decades and only very recently started to recover. We believe here the resurrection of big wildlife is less depending on investments into habitats, but more depending on the management of society as well the spatio-temporal regulation of wildlife populations:

• Investments are needed into stakeholder’s acceptance and social attitude towards changes in parts of their home landscapes (“from rural to re-wildering areas”). Intensive collaboration between most relevant stakeholders, in our case hunters association, state forestry and nature conservation foundation have formed a project group with a common projects aim.
• The scientific database for the spatio-temporal habitat demands of mainly red deer is needed and as an output there must be a large-scale master plan to enable both, the prevention of arable land from damages, as well as the survival and migration of big wildlife inside and through cultural landscapes.
• A widely accepted and commonly implemented small-scaled population management and hunting plan must be developed to safeguard especially a) the minimum viable population sizes of wildlife b) the supply of year-round habitat demands c) the functioning population regulation by means of hunting d) the usage of red deer’s bio-engineer services e) the overall acceptance of the new role of wilderness in formerly used landscapes.