Project area

Welcome to Auenland am Rhein!

This region is home to hundreds of thousands of geese, ducks, swans and snipes. Western Europe’s longest river is not only Germany’s most important waterway, the home of Loreley, setting for countless wine festival and the source of much of Germany’s culture, history and customs; it is also one of the most significant nesting, resting and wintering areas for several thousand waterbirds in Western Europe. There is a good reason why this part of the Rhine valley from Duisburg to the Dutch border was designated as the EU’s Lower Rhine bird sanctuary in 1983.

The Lower Rhine bird sanctuary is comprised of more than 25,000 hectares of land between the dykes. Meadows, pastures, deep and shallow waters, scrubland, hedges and floodplain copses provide a range of diverse habitats that plays host to a wide variety of flora and fauna.

Our project was focused on one small part of this enormous area with the aim of regenerating it over the coming years to provide a home for rare species such as the black-tailed godwit, redshank and corncrake well into the future. Great efforts were needed in order to achieve this, and these are outlined in the following pages.