German guidelines for designing alternative bank protection measures

Abstract

Prompted by the European Water Framework Directive, more environmental friendly bank protection measures will be demanded both for small waters and for inland waterways. These measures should contain as much living or at least dead plants as possible, combined with technical building materials if necessary, to avoid erosion from the natural and vessel-induced flow and wave field. In the following, they will be called technical-biological bank protections. To collect and condense the existing knowledge in this field, the German Association for Water, Wastewater and Waste (DWA) founded a corresponding working group whose main idea was to transfer existing experiences from waters without navigation to those with significant impact from navigation and to account for first results of an ongoing mutual research project of the German Institutes BAW (Federal Waterways Engineering and Research Institute) and BfG (Federal Institute of Hydrology) concerning the same subject but for waterways only. The results were published in a Code of Practice for planners of waterway infrastructure in 2016 (M519). The present paper outlines the basic ideas of M519, how it can be applied and shall encourage the readers to use it to find best-fitted environmental friendly bank protections for navigable waters.

Germany’s federal waterways – A linear infrastructure network for nature and transport

“…The results of research and best practise examples are presented on the internet: https://ufersicherung.baw.de. The aim of this project is to develop recommendations and basic principles to facilitate an application of the newly-developed methods for bank protection of inland waterways (Söhngen et al 2018).…”

CFD analysis of environmentally friendly wave mitigation measures in river waterways

“…For instance, several projects on German rivers focus on the replacement and enhancement of classical bank protection measures by vegetation‐based solutions. These measures are valuable for shore‐based biotopes and bank protection, but they usually do not directly protect aquatic habitats against ship‐induced waves (Fleischer, 2014; Fleischer, Herz, Kolb, & et al, 2006; Söhngen, Fleischer, & Liebenstein, 2018).…”