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DEHI Danube Environmental History Initiative

Donau, Danuvius, Dānu, Dunaj, Duna, Dunărea, Duná, Tuna, Istros, Donava, Dunav, Дунав, Дунай, دانوب

The Danube River Basin is currently home to about 81 million people. The river itself crosses 10 European countries and drains one of the most international river basins in the world. With a length of about 2.800 km the Danube is the second longest stream in Europe after the Volga. Its natural characteristics change remarkably from the source to the mouth. Low water temperatures, steep slopes and alpine tributaries dominate the headwater section while the lower reach shows the Danube as a typical lowland river with slow velocity and vast floodplains. The Danube delta is the largest remaining wetland in Europe and famous for its diversity of animal and plant species. The Danube riverine landscapes have been the site of human interventions into land-cover and hydrology, challenging societies along its banks for millennia. A fascinating diversity of life worlds has developed along the river’s banks.

DEHI is a network of researchers …
from different disciplines from the natural and social sciences and from the humanities interested in the Danubian landscapes’ past. DEHI acts as a common platform for exchange and compilation of information and international coordination of research. It compiles regional and national research and makes these compilations available for scholars and the broader public. DEHI’s steering committee, consisting of Christoph Bernhardt, Julia Lajus, József Laszlovszky, Mark Graham Macklin, Mariyana Nikolova, Didier Pont and Verena Winiwarter, aims to bring environmental history research on the Danube River Basin to the attention of scholarly and environmental policy communities and initiates new research in a co-ordinated way.

The Danube exhibits a plethora of environmental problems …
among them hydromorphological change, pollution, flooding, loss of biodiversity and the almost total demise of fisheries are most pressing. Many of those problems will be exacerbated by global climate change. The current situation of the Danube river basin cannot be understood if the common past of nature and humans is studied apart. Rivers are neither cultural nor natural spaces. They are socio-natural sites, where the interplay of humans with the environment can be studied over long periods. In the past, the Danube and its tributaries often were boundaries, protective zones and communication routes. Under different geopolitical circumstances, these rivers have been commons and currently become an integral part of the European Union’s energy and transport systems. Cultural, ethnic, political, economic and ecological factors of their history are evident in institutional arrangements and governance characteristics. Interdisciplinary environmental history takes this complexity into account.

DEHI actively seeks the link to scholars …
working on the environmental history of the Danube and its tributaries in all its aspects. The network is open for scholars who are interested the Danube but work on other major rivers in Europe and beyond.
If you would like to join DEHI, please visit our website to get in touch.

DEHI contact:
Danube Environmental History Initiative
c/o Center for Environmental History
IFF-Faculty for Interdisciplinary Studies
Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt-Graz-Wien
Schottenfeldgasse 29/6
1070 Vienna, Austria
phone: +43 1 5224000-506
fax: +43 1 5224000-577

DEHI coordinators:
Ass.Prof. Dr. Martin Schmid
martin.schmid@uni-klu.ac.at

Dr. Gertrud Haidvogl
gertrud.haidvogl@boku.ac.at

Link zu Website oder Homepage: umweltgeschichte.uni-klu.ac.at/dehi
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