Alpine Austria Nature Nonprofits

Austria is two-thirds mountain, and the eastern Alps are gentler and greener than their Swiss and French counterparts, with wide pastured valleys, high meadows cut for hay, and a farming culture that has maintained the open alpine landscape for centuries. The Hohe Tauern holds the country’s highest peaks and its largest national park, and glaciers still hang in its cirques, though not for much longer at the current rate.

The bearded vulture, exterminated across the Alps by the early twentieth century, was reintroduced here and now breeds again in the high valleys, one of Europe’s most satisfying conservation returns. The alpine meadows, cut and grazed rather than fertilised, are among the most botanically rich grasslands on the continent, and they persist only because someone continues to farm them in the old way.

The organizations here protect those meadows and the farming that maintains them, defend the remaining free-flowing alpine rivers against small hydropower, and manage the arrival of wolves and bears in valleys that have been without them for generations.