Industrialization of the Danube as a socio-natural site

Sufficient space and dynamic hydrological processes are crucial factors for the ecological functionality of river landscapes. These interact with human uses, whereby natural processes and anthropogenic interventions in the upper reaches also affect the lower reaches of a river. IDAN investigates when and how the Danube was affected by the industrialization process of the last centuries and at what point human activities began to dominate the river dynamics. To this end, the changes to the Danube landscape over a length of 843 kilometers from the German-Austrian border to the mouth of the Drava River at the Croatian-Serbian border are being reconstructed from an environmental history and river morphology perspective. Based on digital reconstructions of the river landscape around 1780, 1860 and 1940, the project analyzes which patterns of hydromorphological `Fluvial Landscape Units` (FLUs) determined the respective river landscape. Human land and water uses are examined for several locations on different sections of the Danube and systematically combined with the river morphology. This will show what certain FLUs were used for, whether and when they were adapted for certain uses through technical interventions and which forms of use have changed or outlasted the river dynamics in the long term. The approach shows the social vulnerability to threats such as erosion or flooding in a long-term and large-scale perspective. Interactions between the upper and lower reaches become visible and comparisons between urban and rural sections become possible. The joint spatio-temporal analysis of river morphology and human uses makes historical patterns and their changes along the river continuum visible. Turning points in the socio-natural history of the Danube become just as clear as the long-term negative consequences of human-induced changes up to the present day. In methodological terms, IDAN develops a robust systematic approach to the interdisciplinary characterization of industrialized rivers that can be transferred to other river systems.