The government of Germany announced Thursday that it will convert 62 underutilized military bases into nature preserves that will be housing various rare species of birds.
Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks said that about 76,600 acres of land, comprising of forests, marshes, meadows and moors, will be set aside to benefit the wildlife, Yahoo! News reported. The decision comes at a time when the German military is in the process of overhauling its armed forces.
The choice to turn Germany's 62 military bases into reserves was agreed upon by the parliamentary budget committee on Thursday. Some of these sites will be made open to the public, but the rest of the areas will be protected by the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation.
"We are seizing a historic opportunity with this conversion - many areas that were once no-go zones are no longer needed for military purposes," Hendricks revealed. "We are fortunate that we can now give these places back to nature."
Germany intends to also turn the sites into reserves for bats and beetles, aside from woodpeckers, eagles and other birds, according to The Huffington Post.
The government initially thought of selling the properties off to real estate, but they then decided to contribute the lands to the development of the European Green Belt, according to The Independent. The initiative, which began during the time of former Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev, aims to develop the former Iron Curtain boundaries into a series of nature parks.
"Today the European Green Belt is an ecological network and memorial landscape running from the Barents to the Black Sea," a spokesperson from the European Green Belt said.
