Many valuable ecological corridors of the Carpathian and other mountain ranges in the Danube region are impeded or threatened by economic development such as linear transport infrastructure or intensive agricultural, forestry, or water management practices. The project SaveGREEN (http://www.interreg-danube.eu/approved-projects/savegreen) aims to demonstrate ways of designing appropriate mitigation measures and maintaining or improving the functionality of ecological corridors through integrated planning. The project partnership covers key sectors to be involved in integrated planning of mitigation measures: nature conservation (ministries, agencies, authorities, NGOs), research and education (universities, research institution), transport (ministries, motorway companies) and consultancy business (limited company) and ASPs from complementary sectors from Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Ukraine.
A particular interest of SaveGREEN is the interplay of different aspects of corridors: on a landscape-scale, the structural connectivity describes the permeability of the landscape due to land-cover characteristics, while the functional connectivity relates to the interactions of animals with these landscape structures due to their needs. The structural connectivity of corridors will be designated and assessed by using GIS techniques based on data mostly derived by remote sensing. In contrast, monitoring the functional connectivity (the “species perspective”) needs information and data surveyed in the field by collecting relevant parameters in-situ. To do so, each of the eight pilot areas will collect field survey data at locations identified as bottleneck situations in the monitoring of the structural connectivity. This will be done for a set of different species groups like large carnivores, large herbivores and medium-sized mammals. This approach will allow for - the first time for the Danube-Carpathians region - insights in the relationship between landscape structures and their suitability as corridors on different levels of scale and for several animal groups, which will be communicated with local, regional and national stakeholders.