A restored Werra floodplain wetland in northern Hesse, renowned for its exceptional importance for migratory and breeding birds.
Rhäden bei Obersuhl und Bosserode
Rhäden bei Obersuhl und Bosserode is a protected wetland landscape in the northern Hessian Werra valley, near the border with Thuringia. The site occupies the southwestern part of a shallow basin shaped by the underground dissolution of Permian salt deposits, a geological process that created a depression historically filled with a lake, then a boggy marshland, and finally a drained agricultural plain. After decades of drainage and use, the area fell into neglect during the era of the inner-German border, and conservationists began restoring it to a natural floodplain in the 1970s.
Today, the protected area covers roughly 120 hectares of ponds, reedbeds, wet meadows, riparian woodland, and poplar plantations undergoing conversion. It is classified as a national nature reserve, a European Fauna-Flora-Habitat site, and is part of a larger EU Bird Protection Area along the middle Werra. The Rhäden is especially valued for its role as a breeding, feeding, and resting area for birds, and is considered one of the most important birdwatching sites in Hesse and Thuringia.
Beyond its ornithological significance, the reserve shelters rare amphibians such as the northern crested newt, fish such as the bitterling, and the highly threatened dusky large blue butterfly. It also marks an early practical example of cross-border conservation, having been extended across the former East-West German frontier through cooperation between the Hessian nature protection volunteers and the former East German community of Dankmarshausen.
