LIFE IP GrassBirdHabitats

Conservation of wet grassland breeding bird habitats in the Atlantic region

About the project  

LIFE Integrated Project

Welcome to the website of the LIFE IP GrassBirdHabitats project, an EU-funded initiative dedicated to protecting meadow birds and their habitats. Our goal is to create and connect optimal breeding and non-breeding areas along the East Atlantic Flyway.

The project focuses on habitat conservation and restoration in Lower Saxony (Germany) and Fryslân (the Netherlands) while also developing a strategic conservation plan for meadow birds in the Atlantic region of Europe and in West Africa.

The project will run for ten years. It started in November 2020 and will be concluded by the end of October 2030.

Together with his colleague from the Nature Conservation Station Unterelbe, Jan-Henrik Junge, Hilger Lemke – site manager for northern Lower Saxony in…

Read more

In our project areas in Lower Saxony, the Black-tailed Godwit breeding season slowly ends in late June: all known active nests already hatched.…

Read more

In a recent exploratory visit to the Special Protection Area Barnbruch, representatives from NABU Ecological Station Aller/Oker (ÖNSA), the district…

Read more

We are announcing two exciting PhD positions to contribute to meadow bird conservation in West Africa within our project. This research is a…

Read more

What we do

To improve the conservation status of meadow birds along the East Atlantic Flyway, a team of more than 40 people is carrying out various measures. Our common goal is to increase the birds' reproduction rates in the Netherlands and Germany and to improve their return rates from their wintering grounds in West Africa.

More about our measures

Our focus species

Transmitter birds

In six years of challenging field work, we have equipped more than 380 adult and juvenile Black-tailed Godwits with GPS transmitters, and collected more than 256,000 locations. We use lightweight transmitters with lots of different sensors to gain detailed movement and behavioural data from the birds. 

With this information, we want to improve conservation measures for Black-tailed Godwits and other meadow birds along the East Atlantic Flyway.

Track our Godwits More about our transmitter birds

The project in numbers

0  mil. out of 353 mil.

complementary funding acquired

0  ha

total project area

0  %

of all European Black-tailed Godwits breed in Germany and the Netherlands

0 birds

tagged with GPS transmitters

Where we work

Our project areas comprise the core breeding areas of meadow birds in the north-western European Plain (in Lower Saxony and Fryslân) and their core wintering sites (in West Africa) along the East Atlantic Flyway.

More about our project areas