In order to force politics to take more responsibility in acting against ecological, economic and social problems related to water, the European Union implemented the Water Framework Directive. For each river basin district member, the states had to develop, implement and monitor measures to reach its prescribed goals. As a tool to accomplish this goal, so-called river basin management plans were required.
The implementation is an individual matter for the member states and must be reported regularly. In Germany, the German Council for Land Stewardship worked on a project financially supported by the North Rhine-Westphalia State Agency for Nature, Environment and Consumer Protection and Lennart-Bernadotte-Stiftung, in order to investigate how, in the sense of a beam effect, water biocoenoses in restricted areas can be developed and decoupled from a complete structural improvement in the area concerned. The applicability of stepping stones was thereby to be examined for the beam effect of interventions on running waters, as a parallel to wildlife corridors.