IENE 2016

Defragmentation needs environmental information, strategy approaches and programs which comprise concepts for sustainable measures that altogether must regularly be adapted to new insights about ecosystems, dynamics of land use and landscape change and recognized societal needs as e. g. the need of a integrative green infrastructure (EU, COM 249 (2013)).

Albeit European national states develop programs to reconnect habitats across and along their road networks since more than thirty years, hot spots for measures are often identified and located at accident areas with game or at intersections of planned or existing ecological corridors. But often fauna passages are not integrated into a corridor management or integrative concepts for green infrastructure. Especially for safeguarding international important migration corridors and needed international cross border activities plans and relevant information are missing or are vague (with some outstanding well-defined exceptions).

Based on the pan-european activities in the past and in consideration of the experiences of the German Defragmentation Program (GDP) and its application in the federal states different developed tools and methods as a possible part for the improvement of a coherent European Green Infrastructure network in the context of traffic infrastructure are presented. These range from ecological models to describe nationwide habitat networks (Habitat-Net), the defragmentation of habitat networks for the whole country (Unfragmented functional areas (UFA)), the prioritization of defragmentation areas across the road network in combination with regional plans to interlink habitats, the systematic differentiation and valuation of determined bottlenecks in the habitat networks which are potentially endangered by urban settlement to legally binding rules.