The ENVIBASE-Project

Documentation / Online Handbook

Land use and Biotopes

Description of the Problem

The living conditions for wild plant and animal species have clearly worsened since the middle of the last century, especially in the urban areas. About half of the wild plant and animal species previously present in Berlin are today extinct, threatened by extinction, or endangered.

The most important causes of the species’ decline are the destruction of the natural habitats and the change in the conditions of life. As a consequence of the utilisation of areas for development, soil impermeability, etc., habitats have been and are being destroyed or subdivided so greatly that they no longer offer undisturbed refuge for sensitive species. Furthermore, the introduction of harmful materials from industry, trade, traffic, and households leads to considerable impairment of the natural foundations of life.

Bank reinforcement, intensive leisure and water-sport use, as well as nutrient pollution affect water and shoreline biotopes negatively. In the Havel, the reed-beds have receded by approximately 80% since 1959, which has been accompanied by the loss of habitats for numerous species. Drops in the groundwater tables as a consequence of the production of drinking water constitute a grave problem. Groundwater-dependent forest lands in some cases display considerable drought damage.

In addition to the regulations for the protection of individual species, other legal instruments to counteract species decline exist in the federal and state Conservation Laws, with provisions for the certification of protected areas and for landscape planning. While the certification of protected areas primarily serves to protect still available well-developed biotopes from other uses, the landscape planning instruments also serve the development of biotic potential. The goal of conservation, as determined by the Federal Conservation Law, is to protect, care for, and develop nature, the basis for human life in both settled and unsettled areas, in such a way that the productive power of the ecosystem, the utility of natural products, and the plant and animal kingdoms, as well as the diversity, uniqueness and beauty of nature and the landscape, can be preserved, promoted and developed.

Data Sources

Since the 80s, various investigations concerning the biotic inventory of open spaces and biotopes, completed for East Berlin during the last years, were realised. These fundamentals were engaged by the public administration as basic information for planning or special programmes like the landscape programme or results from research projects of the universities or other scientific organisations. All these studies are stored in a data bank. This leads to a stock-taking of all types of biotopes for the whole built-up and non-built-up area of Berlin. In addition, remarks and corrections by staff members of the borough Conservation and Green Spaces Agencies and the Berlin Ministry for Urban Development Environmental Protection and Technology (SenStadtUmTech) and from volunteer conservationist experts were incorporated. For the different maps worked out on this database, aerial photographs were also used.

The delimitation of the biotopes in the surrounding areas of Brandenburg is based on the latest biotope mapping updated in 1993 by the Brandenburg State Environmental Agency.

Despite this preponderance of information, knowledge of occurrences and values of individual biotopes or organism groups remain incomplete due to the size of the area under investigation and the frequent use changes.

Methods

The easiest way to describe the quality of landscape and biotopes is to list a species inventory of plants and animals. This was done, for example, for the age and inventory structure of all forests in Berlin.

For the appraisal of biotopes, it is more difficult to create a useful methodology. There exists a multitude of criteria which can be used. According to region, differences in utilisation effect, and biotope type, appraisal criteria differ. They are difficult to standardise. Quantification, such as species mapping, is expensive and time consuming. The data obtained are usually not suitable for exact classification because there are no generally valid rules on which to rely.

Due to the expense, a targeted field survey is frequently impossible. Therefore, it is necessary to rely on the evaluation of aerial photography. Here, other criteria must be used than that used for a field survey. The lack of any codification makes great technical knowledge and a wealth of experience on the part of the expert necessary and accordingly leaves wide scope for subjective judgement.

For the mapping of valuable areas for flora and fauna, criteria like species and association diversity; proportion of rare and endangered species in viable populations; biogeographic particularity; old anthropogenic structures; near-natural, time-related replaceability; size, use and care intensity; or structural diversity were used.

To portray the quality of habitats, it is also helpful to use indicators. Breeding birds, for example, are for various reasons well suited as indicators. They occur in almost all landscape types and settle into them quickly, they display no extreme fluctuation of population, and, since they are at the end of the food chain, they make complex demands upon their respective habitats. Indicators react in visible ways to ecological damage and thus represent other groups of organisms or whole biotic communities. Breeding birds can, as indicators, indicate deficits and qualities of habitats, such as near-naturalness, structural diversity, intensity of disturbance, or the relationship to other habitats, and thus form a basis for conservation planning.

Because of the lack of resources, it is for the most part not possible to finance field surveys for the whole territory. In this case, it is useful to work with methods of typification. For the creation of a vegetation map, urban structure types and representative investigations were used. The extension on the whole territory was made by analogical reference with statistical assurance.

Results

The eight maps in the biotopes chapter have so far been published in the Berlin Environmental Atlas. The Atlas provides a complete overview of the biotic inventory of the whole city area. It shows all types of vegetation within the built-up and non-built-up city, areas with a special value for flora and fauna, the age and structure of forests, the balance sheet of breeding bird population, and nature and landscape conservation areas.