KU Floodplain Institute provides expertise for EU environmental program
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The flagship project DALIA (Danube river basin lighthouse – restoration of fresh and transitional water ecosystems) supports the EU's goal to fully explore and restore Europe's marine and freshwater ecosystems by 2030. The project is scheduled to run for four years, and a total of 22 expert organizations and institutions such as universities, public authorities, companies and non-governmental organizations from eight European countries are involved in DALIA. They not only cover the Danube region from Germany to Romania in geographical terms, but also contribute varied professional expertise to the project.
In the area of the Danube and its tributaries, well over 50 per cent of the water bodies do not meet the criteria for good chemical status, and deterioration can be seen in many indicators throughout Europe, explains the head of the Floodplain Institute, Prof. Dr. Bernd Cyffka. "Besides, the river also has important economic functions, supporting small and medium-sized businesses, creating jobs for local people. And last but not least, the Danube also has a cultural significance." For a proper management of this complex and fragile ecosystem, he said, it is necessary to "think of a unified management of the river basin and harmonize measures from the Black Forest to the Black Sea."
The DALIA project is intended to make a contribution to this efforts by compiling findings from successful pilot projects and making them available for other river basins. The pilot sites are located in Germany, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary. The project "Dynamization of the Danube floodplains between Neuburg and Ingolstadt", which has been accompanied by the KU Floodplain Institute for years, is the only German pilot site to offer valuable expertise, which will now be used within the framework of DALIA, Cyffka said. Accordingly, the pilot site Neuburg can be used to learn how to realize the diversion of a river in order to supply a drained floodplain forest with water again – and how to realize a dynamization of the floodplains in this way, both as regards technical implementation and organizational steps. In this way, a bypass watercourse, the Ottheinrichbach, of eight kilometers in length was partially recreated between Neuburg and Ingolstadt.
In the DALIA project, the researchers of the Floodplain Institute also take on the overarching task of defining indicators for the survey of pilot sites and of recording and evaluating these characteristic data. This would "lay important milestones so that further renaturation programs can be implemented in other regions", said Cyffka. The DALIA project once again offers the Floodplain Institute the opportunity to have an impact throughout Europe and to strengthen cooperation with other institutions in other countries.