The Moravian Amazon and eDNA
Miloš Vojtěchovský
Summary: (…) Although ecologically, politically and economically tinged debates continue on this topic, two more national parks could be created in the Czech Republic in the near future.
It seems that environmental alarm clocks are ticking relentlessly and the time we have lost in the last 30 years arguing about the need for a greater sensitivity to nature is going against conservationist ideas, and at the expense of the chances of survival of those more or less rare and fragile sites and habitats.
The civic association Zachraňme soutok (Let's Save the Confluence) is trying to advocate mainly for changes in the approach that the state-owned company Lesy ČR, based in Židlochovice, has so far used to manage the floodplain forests on the “confluence.” The citizens initiative, co-founded in Lanžhot by the biologist Mgr. Anežka Bartošová has managed to achieve something unlikely: their petition for legislative protection of the area, which they published on 21 August 2020, has so far been supported by over 8,000 citizens and experts from various fields.
The original water systems have long since been damaged by the construction and alteration of the upper reaches of the Dyje and Morava rivers. At the end of November 2019, the Agency for the Protection of Nature and Landscape of the Czech Republic (AOPK) sent to the Ministry of the Environment a plan for the declaration of the national nature reserve “Lanžhotské pralesy,” comprising eight separate segments with a total area of approximately 440 ha.