Wadden Sea
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How it came to be
The Wadden Sea runs along some 500 km of the south-eastern North Sea coast, from Den Helder in the Netherlands past the great German estuaries to Skallingen in Denmark. It is the largest unbroken system of intertidal sand and mud flats in the world, shaped by tides and living things into channels, shoals, seagrass meadows, mussel beds, salt marshes and dunes. Its coasts suffered great storm floods, among them the St Marcellus floods of 1219 and 1362, the Burchardi flood of 1634 and the Christmas Flood of 1717, which together cost thousands of lives. The dikes built since have made it one of the most human-altered habitats on the planet.
The Netherlands, Denmark and Germany have worked together to protect the Wadden Sea since 1978, and in 1982 they signed a Joint Declaration on its protection. A Trilateral Wadden Sea Plan followed in 1997, and the common secretariat sits in Wilhelmshaven in Germany. The area supports about 2,700 marine species and at least 5,000 species of the salt marshes, dunes and islands.
An average of 10 to 12 million migrating birds pass through each year, and more than 6 million may be present at one time. The Dutch and German parts were inscribed in 2009. The Hamburg Wadden Sea National Park was added in 2011, and most of the Danish Wadden Sea conservation area in 2014.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s licence. This is an early version and may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).