Tiroler Lech LIFE Projects — Riverbed Widening on Austria's Last Wild Alpine River

The Tyrolean Lech is one of the last largely free-flowing Alpine rivers. The first LIFE project (LIFE00 NAT/A/007053, 2001–2007, EU contribution €3.87M, led by the Tyrolean government with WWF Austria) restored river dynamics over 6 km of the Lech and Vils, removed two gravel barriers to increase bedload transport and created or restored 40 ponds for amphibians and the dragonfly Coenagrion hylas. The planned 35 ha of new gravel-bank habitat is a stated objective; the project page does not report the area actually achieved.
A follow-up LIFE project (2016–2022, roughly €6M, about 60% EU co-financed) delivered 13 river-engineering works, around 14 km of unsecured bank and up to 62 ha of additional space for natural dynamics, according to the Austrian ministry. An EU Mission Adaptation case study reports that riverbed widening at the Forchach bridge went from 40 m to 110 m and that monitoring shows two characteristic bird species have increased, without naming them or giving numbers.
Caveats: no quantified flood-risk reduction or carbon data is published; groundwater lowering remains a flagged threat to target habitats; species outcomes are only partly documented.

Read the full analysis: https://mission-adaptation-portal.ec.europa.eu/stories-0/restoring-wild-river-ecosystems-and-turning-grey-solutions-nature-based-solutions_en