The Würzburg metropolitan area is an important traffic hub in the German highway network. Particularly in the area around the city of Würzburg, there were a number of weaknesses in the existing long-distance road network that had a negative impact on the entire area north of Würzburg and on the Main-Spessart district. In addition, there was a lack of high-performance development in the area to connect the centers there, such as Karlstadt, Lohr and Gemünden, to the long-distance road network in line with demand.
In collaboration with the planning offices Kortemeier & Brokmann Landschaftsarchitekten und Planungsgruppe Umwelt, ANUVA prepared the nature conservation documents for the regional planning procedure and the subsequent line determination procedure. The services included, among other things, an environmental impact assessment, expert opinions on the impact of European species and area protection at the level of line determination as well as faunistic expert contributions with subsequent support of the public legal procedure. For the approval of the first construction phase near Arnstein, ANUVA prepared the faunistic expert opinions, the species protection law contribution, the biotope mapping and participated in the accompanying landscape conservation plan.
Extensive faunistic and floristic mapping was carried out for a procedural and legally sound assessment of the FFH compatibility and the species protection relevance of the routes to be investigated in a study area of around 32,000 ha. The focus of the investigation was on the so-called "red traffic light species". These are species that can prove to be critical for approval as a result of the FFH and species protection law considerations. In order to keep the investigation effort within an appropriate framework for the planning level, ANUVA developed a two-stage methodology for recording the fauna, as well as a methodology for processing individual modules that considered possible effects on the fourteen FFH areas and the protection of species.