Ecology and Management of Selected Open Land Habitat Types

Habitat types (habitat types) listed in Annex I of the Habitats Directive are often based on plant communities, i.e. communities of different plant species. These grow together because they favour similar abiotic site factors (pH value, soil moisture, nutrient content, etc.) and because they ‘get along’, i.e. their competition for resources such as nutrients allows for compatible coexistence at the same site (Ellenberg & Leuschner 2010). The abiotic site factors and the biotic components such as competition between species thus characterise the biotic communities of a habitat and thus characterise FFH habitat types. The competitive relationships between species, as well as abiotic site factors, are strongly influenced by the respective utilisation or management of the habitat. And not only the current, but also the historical utilisation of a habitat plays a major role (Poschlod 2015).

In the man-made cultural landscape, which covers the majority of the area in Europe and especially in Germany, habitat types predominate that have been created through specific human utilisation (Ellenberg & Leuschner 2010, Poschlod 2015) and can only be preserved by maintaining or restoring this utilisation or through management that ‘imitates’ this utilisation. Without this utilisation or the corresponding management, the habitat types created by human use would become forest in the course of natural succession (succession of biotic communities over time) in almost all locations in Central Europe. In contrast, natural habitats such as forests, raised bogs or watercourses and the FFH habitat types they represent do not require utilisation for their conservation and their management consists at most of abandoning utilisation and thus allowing more or less intensively used forests to become ‘natural forests’ or - in the case of raised bogs and watercourses - renaturing the systems once in order to then leave them to their independent, natural development towards a good conservation status.

For this reason, teaching unit C 1 focusses on FFH habitat types of open land created by human use. Brief descriptions of the ecology, distribution and species composition of the Habitats Directive habitat types can be found in the list of habitat types, the VR panoramas of the habitat types and under the links to the brief profiles of the BfN.

Photo Gallery

Sources

Ellenberg H. & Leuschner C. (2010): Vegetation of Central Europe with the Alps. 6th ed. Ulmer Stuttgart. 1357 S.

Poschlod, P. (2015): History of the cultural landscape. Ulmer, Stuttgart. 320 S.