What do you think of this fact?
For almost 40 years, hardly anyone was allowed to set foot on the strip of land between East and West Germany. For plants and animals, that turned out to be a stroke of luck. Today the old border has become the “Green Belt”, about 1,400 kilometers of nature running right across Germany.
A strip from the Baltic Sea to Bavaria
According to the conservation group BUND Naturschutz, the Green Belt runs from Travemünde on the Baltic Sea to the point near Hof where Germany meets the Czech Republic. Along the way it crosses 17 natural regions and nine German states. Germany’s Federal Agency for Nature Conservation mapped the strip and measured 1,393 kilometers.
It isn’t wide, though: usually just 50 to 200 meters. Added up, that makes about 177 square kilometers. Today almost two thirds of that area are protected under the EU’s Natura 2000 network.
5,000 species on a narrow strip
The figures from BUND Naturschutz are impressive: 146 different habitat types, over 5,000 animal and plant species, and more than 1,200 of them are on the Red List of threatened species. Residents include whinchats, great grey shrikes, black storks, otters, lynx and wildcats, plus plants like arnica and globeflower.
Kai Frobel saw the value of this strip early on. Back in the 1970s, the man who later became a species protection officer at BUND Naturschutz already realized how valuable the nature along the border was. Shortly after the border opened, around 400 conservationists from East and West met and unanimously called for the border’s nature to be protected. BUND calls this the foundation of the first all-German conservation project.
In November 2018, the part of the Green Belt in Thuringia was declared a National Natural Monument.
And it goes even further
The German Green Belt is just one piece of a much bigger project. The “European Green Belt” follows the entire former Iron Curtain across the continent and aims to link habitats across national borders.
A border that was built to keep people apart now connects otters, lynx and globeflowers.