Nature tourism is an essen­tial part of any nation­al park. The trick is to steer it on the right track. On the one hand, vis­i­tors should be made famil­iar with nature, and on the oth­er hand, it should not be pol­lut­ed or even destroyed. The Low­er Oder Val­ley has the advan­tage that, due to its remote bor­der loca­tion, it is still not over­run by tourists, unlike clas­sic tourist regions in Sax­on Switzer­land, in the Harz Moun­tains or on the coasts of the sea. In the Low­er Oder Val­ley, vis­i­tors are on their own most days of the year.

Nev­er­the­less, there are a few things to con­sid­er, also with a view to the desired increase in vis­i­tors. Right from the start, con­ser­va­tion­ists crit­i­cized the fact that the 200-kilo­me­ter net­work of trails is too dense for a small nation­al park with an area of 10,000 hectares. The birds in par­tic­u­lar are too dis­turbed in the open, wide land­scape when there are many vis­i­tors in the area. In the future, some paths will sim­ply go out of use in the course of time if they are not reg­u­lar­ly main­tained, but it would make sense to con­trol this nec­es­sary shrink­ing process a little.

It would also be impor­tant not to lead all tourists straight into the heart of the nation­al park. Periph­er­al attrac­tions can take on a fil­ter func­tion here and still attract more peo­ple, on whom the tourism indus­try is depen­dent, to the region. The attrac­tive one also serves this pur­pose Bison enclo­sure next to the vis­i­tor car park in Criewen. But this is a pri­vate ini­tia­tive. Fur­ther, sim­i­lar mea­sures would be use­ful here.

The problem area of boat traffic

One must also keep an eye on the boat traf­fic in the pro­tect­ed areas. In the Pol­ish Zwis­chen­oder­land, the boats, includ­ing motor­boats, trav­el on the approx­i­mate­ly 200 kilo­me­ters of water­ways, today more or less unhin­dered and uncon­trolled, a seri­ous encroach­ment on the untouched nature that is oth­er­wise only dis­turbed by anglers. On the Ger­man side, the sit­u­a­tion was sim­pler in that it was not pos­si­ble to enter the pold­ers direct­ly from the fed­er­al water­ways, which are of course open to ship­ping. In addi­tion, boat traf­fic was not allowed on the pold­er waters dur­ing the GDR rule. So no restric­tions were nec­es­sary. Nev­er­the­less, the nation­al park admin­is­tra­tion has new­ly estab­lished canoe tourism in the area, albeit lim­it­ed in terms of time and loca­tion. Once intro­duced, there is always a risk of expan­sion and expan­sion. The rel­a­tive­ly small, open pro­tect­ed area does not tol­er­ate the vis­i­tor-relat­ed dis­tur­bances on the numer­ous hik­ing trails and fur­ther dis­tur­bances from the soon as numer­ous waters. So here you have to keep a very close eye on the development.