The Lower Morava Biosphere Reserve

Year of designation:              2003 (by extension of Palava BR, established in 1986)

The total area:                       349 km²

General Description:  Situated in South Moravia, about 35 km south of Brno and next to the Austrian and Slovak borders. The BR's dominant landscape feature - the Pavlov hills - consists of limestone cliffs and steep slopes of, covered with steppes, forests and grasslands, however a considerable part has also been transformed into arable land and vineyards. The northeastern part of the biosphere reserve is situated in the flat alluvium of the Dyje River which is now mostly converted into agricultural land with some remnants of floodplain meadows and forests. The southern and eastern parts are characterised by arable land. The largest mid-European area of hard-wood alluvial forests and continental flood-plain meadows (some 8000ha) is preserved in the southeastern triangle between the town of Breclav, the village of Tynec and the confluence of the Morava and Dyje Rivers. The central part of the BR is made up of a depression occupied by fishponds (shallow, artificial lakes) in the designed man-made landscape built in the 1800's, today declared as UNESCO's World Heritage Landscape.

The Lower Morava Biosphere Reserve encompasses a number of areas of national and international importance. Among them you can find sites belonging to the Natura 2000 network, special protection areas including the Pálava Protected Landscape Area, the Lednice-Valtice Cultural Landscape, several Ramsar sites, the Dyje Floodplain Nature Park and the The Morava Quaternary Protected Area of Natural Water Accumulation and others

The Act No. 114/1992 of the Czech National Council on nature and landscape protection determines several types of special protected areas (SPA). They are designated in the following categories: national parks (NP), protected landscape areas (PLA), national nature reserves (NNR), nature reserves (NR), national nature monuments (NNM) and nature monuments (NM). The Lower Morava BR encompasses all of the above mentioned categories with the exception of NP.