European Wildlife

Prague - The European Wildlife conservation organisation (www.eurowildlife.org) started working on its key project. It established the European Centre of Biodiversity, which should act as a "Noah's Ark" of endangered species of plants and animals in Europe.

Primarily, the European Centre of Biodiversity will be a large non-governmental nature reservation which should provide a natural habitat for a large number of endangered species. "Protecting animals in their natural environment is the most effective method of preserving them for future generations," says Dalibor Dostal, the director of the European Wildlife conservation organisation.

"Our priority during the oncoming years will be the creation of a sufficiently large reservation that will help protect species that are now endangered in Europe," added Dostal. The reservation will comprise a network of smaller protected areas complemented by existing national parks and reservations. It will be situated in the area of Central Europe. "When we look at areas with the best biodiversity we find that they are situated in the north, east and south of the continent. Consequently, restoration of biodiversity in Central Europe is important in connecting all these isolated populations in the peripheral areas of Europe and restoration of biodiversity in western Europe in the following years," says Dostal.

The European Centre of Biodiversity will be based on the purchase of land which farmers have ceased cultivating in recent years because it was no longer economically sustainable. In some areas commercial forests will also be purchased and transformed into forest stand made up of a large variety of native species. The project could also support the European Union's plan to halt the decrease in biological diversity on the continent by 2020.

The European Centre of Biodiversity is to become an important non-governmental nature reserve protecting key species of European flora and fauna which are threatened with extinction. Its development is now underway near the largest forest block in Central Europe that lays on the border of the Czech Republic and Germany. Aim of the European Wildlife is to create a reserve which would be ten times ten kilometres large.

Through establishing a sufficiently large reserve, the plan is to create good conditions that will allow large predators and herbivores to migrate over long distances in the years to come, avoiding a continued separation of the individual populations in Europe.

Moreover, another important goal of this project is to slow the onset of climate change, as the newly planted forests will remove around forty thousand tons of CO2 from the atmosphere per year. This is important for species´ adaptation to climate change as it will allow them to migrate to colder regions where they will find better conditions for survival.

Central Europe has been heavily deforested in the past centuries. This has been made evident in recent years by recurrent devastating floods. Therefore, the planting of new forests as part of the European Centre of Biodiversity project is also vital as a preventive measure to reduce the risk of flooding.