Ensuring continuity of large carnivore habitats in Bulgaria through saving bio-corridors for their migrations
Bulgaria is a predominantly mountainous country with good populations of wolves and bears. The lynx has been exterminated at the beginning of 1940s, but is recently recovering naturally from Serbia, through the west Bulgarian border. The golden jackal has populated almost the whole country in lower altitudes, near water sources.
However these wildlife representatives are threatened by too fast developing infrastructure in the whole country. Large ski resorts, numerous hotels, rest houses, etc. are being built in some of the mountains and others are planed in almost every mountainous place of the country. Forests are being cut, on places where it is very important to save them as bio-corridors. The continuity of large carnivore habitats is being destroyed with a high speed. Important connections between subpopulations within the country are getting broken.
Bulgaria entered the EU in January 2007. NATURA 2000 network has been developed and adopted by the Council of Ministers and by EC after the bio-geographical seminars in June 2008.
However, many places the NATURA zones can not provide effective habitat protection, because of habitat fragmentation due to destroying of habitats in close proximity of the zones. There is urgent need to preserve lands, which are important bio-corridors for large carnivore migrations. The sense of preserving such lands is to prevent building on them, to save existing forests suitable for bio-corridors, and to make forestation with a purpose to improve the qualities of potential bio-corridor.
For the activity of forestation of such corridors financing is going to be applied for from the EU programs. The idea is to turn the abandoned agricultural lands in forests. It will be applied for primary forestation from special measure under National Rural Development program (EU financed). It would be a co-financing to the present project and it should cover all expenses related to carrying forestation itself.
The bio-corridors interruption is affecting large carnivore species mainly in the West half of the country. In mid-west and north-west Bulgaria, there are important corridors to be saved, with a purpose of ensuring lynx recovery in the country. Along the west border and in south-west Bulgaria, connection between wolf and bear habitats need to be saved. Along the west border of the country there is a number of mountains which form a continuous large mountain range with some interruptions on some places. The connection between this west Bulgarian mountain chain and the inside country habitats is also very important for all the large carnivore species. However, with small exceptions this connectivity has been broken by roads constructions and urbanization in the plains.
Project aims and objectives
The main project aim is to restore connectivity between two NATURA 2000 sites playing role of stepping stones for bear and wolf populations: BG0000298 “Konyavska planina” and BG0000308 “Verila”. Both sites are situated at 20 km distance from each other and there is suitable corridor of forested habitats between them, interrupted by abounded agricultural lands and pastures with a length of about 7 km. The BG0000308 “Verila” site is part of Rilo-Rodopian population of bear in Bulgaria.
An international road and railway to Greece is passing in the same area and there is an ongoing process of construction (design stage) of a new motorway. The EIA decision requires build-up of one overpass and one under pass along the motorway in order to protect the potential bio-corridor (railway pass through the area by a tunnel).
