Duna-Dráva

The Danube-Drava National Park was created in 1996 in southern Hungary and protects some 490 km² along the floodplains of both rivers. Its best-known sector is Gemenc, an extensive flooded forest on the Danube with oxbows, channels and poplar and willow groves that flood seasonally.

It is one of the best-conserved river wetlands in the Danube basin. The dynamic mosaic of marshes, abandoned meanders, channels and riparian forest absorbs the seasonal floods and maintains water quality downstream, an ecosystem function lost across most of Europe's great canalised rivers.

On 15 September 2021 UNESCO merged the national biosphere reserves of Croatia and Hungary (2012), Serbia (2017), Slovenia (2018) and Austria (2019) into a single Mura-Drava-Danube Transboundary Biosphere Reserve, known as "the Amazon of Europe": almost a million hectares along more than seven hundred kilometres of river corridor, the largest riverine protected area in Europe and the world's first five-country biosphere reserve. The Danube-Drava National Park is one of its core zones. Its forests hold important populations of red deer and white-tailed eagle, and the beaver has recolonised the rivers.