Areas of intervention

Where do we get the knowledge to make decisions about protection measures? How do we know whether a certain species is threatened? The task of monitoring activities is to gather the facts and figures and thus provide a database for protection and revitalisation measures for habitats and species. In the end, monitoring activities also serve as a benchmark to assess whether the actions have succeeded well enough to protect the ecosystems, as can easily be seen from the connection between the monitoring of indicator species for river dynamics described here and the actions under Morphology. Monitoring the species of the Fauna-Flora-Habitats Directive and Birds Directive of the European Union is also one of the main tasks of Natura 2000 areas – which all members of the DANUBEPARKS Network represent.

For the data collected to be useful for the whole river, and for us to draw conclusions on the status of the entire river’s ecosystem, a coordinated way of data collection is needed. This is where the DANUBEPARKS Network comes in: identifying the species to be focused on and elaborating transnational monitoring concepts and databases. This coordinated work helps to identify gaps and evaluates the success of protection measures for the Danube River as a whole.