Can Natura 2000 Sites Benefit from River Basin Management Planning Under a Changing Climate? Lessons from Germany - Wetlands and Water Framework Directive: Protection, Management and Climate Change - page 34

The minimal requirements of Annex IV of the WFD are applied in Germany;
generally speaking: all plans include information on Natura 2000 sites, but just one
plan includes further protected areas in its list of protected areas. All management
plans list and describe in text the water-dependent Natura 2000 sites, but only the
management plan of the Oder included all Natura 2000 sites (also, e.g., dry
grassland). The Warnow-Peene plan considers only Natura 2000 sites that have
been approved by the EU Commission. The Ems management plan additionally
identi

es water-dependent protected areas based on national legislation (Section 23
Federal Nature Conservation Act). In numerous plans, there was no description of
the method used to determine the water-dependent protected areas; reference was
rather made to background documents (Stratmann et al. 2012b , p. 94).
In most plans, information about protected areas was also provided in a printed
map, in a few plans there was only a reference to an online map server. The
presentations on the map servers were often linked to further attributes (e.g. stan-
dard spread sheets). Some but not all plans included a clear presentation of water
body boundaries and protected areas together. As a result, a clear assignment of
protected areas to water bodies was not always possible. In such cases the impact of
planned measures on individual protected areas is thus not clearly identi able, a

factor that must be negatively assessed from a nature conservation perspective
(Stratmann et al. 2012b , p. 96).

Practices of Federal States with regards to the nomination of water-dependent
Natura 2000 sites

￿

There is great variety between some of the Federal States of Germany in terms of
the choice of WFD relevant Natura 2000 sites intended to conserve habitats and
species directly dependent on water. Most of the German non-city States base their
choice of areas on water-dependent habitat types or species, but Saxony nominated
all the Natura 2000 sites. The situation seems similar for Brandenburg. Saxony-
Anhalt though used the depth of the water table as the criterion for determining the
choice of the Natura 2000 sites with habitats and species directly dependent on
water. When the range of species considered is examined, it becomes clear that
North Rhine-Westphalia and Saarland list species from Annex IV of the HD, while
the other states only consider species from Annex II. When nominating water-
dependent bird protection areas, six non-city states considered not only the bird
species from Annex I of the Birds Directive but also migratory birds as mentioned
in Art. 4 para. 2 of the BD. In contrast Schleswig-Holstein and Thuringia restrict
consideration to species from Annex I. There are also area-related criteria. Hesse
and Thuringia explicitly mention that they set no minimum size for consideration,
but in Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemberg a minimum area of 5 ha of water-
dependent habitat types per protected area was stipulated. These, however, only
affected special areas of conservation (SACs) with no relevant water-dependent
species (Hofmann and Schmidt 2012 , p. 216).
In the documents investigated there is usually only brief mentioning of the
procedure followed when nominating the relevant protected areas. It can be
assumed that there are other more detailed differences between the procedures of