Natur und Recht

About Natur und Recht

About Natur und Recht

Natur und Recht — in English, "Nature and Law" — is a German-language scholarly and professional journal devoted to the law of nature conservation and environmental protection. It is published in Germany by Springer, whose OpenAlex host record names Springer Science+Business Media, and whose SCImago-derived listings name the publisher more precisely as Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH. The journal's print ISSN is 0172-1631 and its electronic ISSN is 1439-0515; the ISO 4 abbreviation used in citations is Nat. Recht. It is one of the established German periodicals in environmental law, a field in which most serious publishing still happens in the national language and is aimed at the courts, administrations and practitioners who apply that law every day, as well as at the academics who systematise it.

That positioning matters for anyone who finds the journal through an international database. Natur und Recht is not an English-language research journal competing for global submissions in environmental science. It is a German legal periodical whose centre of gravity is German and European environmental law: nature conservation law, planning law, pollution control, water law, soil protection, and the adjacent bodies of law — hunting, fishing, forestry and agricultural law, animal protection and monument protection — that press upon the natural world. Springer's own subject classification for the title, visible on the journal's page on Springer Nature Link, places it under Administrative Law, Environmental Law and Water. A researcher who understands that framing will read its metrics, its contents and its audience correctly; a researcher who mistakes it for a general environmental-science journal will misjudge all three.

History and Development

The journal's volume numbering tells its own story of longevity. When this profile was researched, Springer's journal page showed Volume 48, Issue 10, dated October 2026, as the latest issue — a numbering that places the first volume in 1979 and confirms a monthly rhythm of publication in the current period. Few German environmental-law periodicals have run continuously across the whole modern history of the discipline: the journal's life spans the years in which environmental law grew from a scattered set of sectoral rules into a codified, constitutionally anchored field, in which the European layer of environmental legislation became dominant, and in which climate protection, species protection and the energy transition moved to the centre of administrative practice.

The Scopus-derived coverage recorded for the title is uneven — the database-derived listings show coverage beginning in 1980, again in 1997–1998, and continuously from 2004 onwards. That unevenness is a fact about database indexing, not about the journal's own publication history: a monthly periodical reaching its forty-eighth volume in 2026 has plainly published through the intervening decades whether or not a given commercial database captured every year of it. Readers verifying the journal's history should therefore treat the volume sequence on the publisher's platform as the primary evidence and database coverage windows as a secondary, indexing-related fact.

Over those decades the journal has documented, and helped to shape, the working law of German nature conservation: the Federal Nature Conservation Act and its state counterparts, the impact-mitigation regime that governs interventions in nature and landscape, habitat and species protection under the European Habitats and Birds Directives as transposed into German law, and the long line of administrative-court decisions through which those rules acquire practical meaning. Its pages are a running record of how German courts and administrations have answered questions that recur in every developed legal system: how much protection a species or habitat receives against a road, a wind farm, a housing development or a flood defence, and who gets to argue about it in court.

Publisher and Publication Model

Springer publishes Natur und Recht on its Springer Nature Link platform, where the complete archive, current issue and submission route are held. Springer's journal page describes the publishing model as hybrid access: most content sits behind a subscription, while individual articles may appear as open access — the journal page noted 223 open access articles in the journal at the time of research. This is the standard model for a long-established German professional legal periodical with a loyal institutional subscriber base of university libraries, court and administration libraries, law firms and public authorities.

Because it is a subscription-based hybrid title, Natur und Recht does not appear in the Directory of Open Access Journals: a search of the DOAJ search API for both of its ISSNs returned no listing, which is exactly what its publishing model predicts. Authors should therefore not expect the article-processing-charge route familiar from fully open access journals; the practical questions for an author are Springer's submission guidelines for the title, the journal's house style for legal writing, and whether their institution's Springer agreements cover any open access option they wish to use. Those details are governed by the publisher's current pages for the journal, which are the authoritative source and should be checked at the time of submission.

Usage figures published by Springer give a sense of the journal's working readership: the journal page reported 120.6 thousand downloads in 2025. For a German-language specialist legal title, that is a substantial professional audience, and it reflects the journal's dual character — cited in scholarship, but also read, downloaded and used by practitioners preparing cases, permits and plans.

Scope and Subject Coverage

Springer's own statement of the journal's scope, published in German on the journal page, is unusually precise, and it is worth following closely. At the centre of the journal, Springer states, stands the whole of the law of ecological nature and environmental protection. Alongside that core, the journal also treats the law that puts pressure on nature — above all building law and specialist planning law. Pollution-control law, waste law, water law, soil-protection law and state planning law all belong to its thematic spectrum, as do the environmentally relevant parts of hunting, fishing, forestry and agricultural law. Finally, animal-protection law and the law protecting historic monuments also find a platform in its pages.

Translated into the working categories of the field, that scope covers, among other things:

• Nature conservation law — protected areas, habitat and biotope protection, the intervention-and-compensation regime, and landscape planning.
• Species protection law — the prohibitions on taking, disturbing or killing protected species, the exceptions and exemptions from those prohibitions, and the assessment duties they impose on projects.
• Planning and building law in its environmental dimension — land-use planning, project approval procedures, and the environmental assessments that accompany them, including environmental impact assessment and habitats assessment.
• Pollution control, waste, water and soil law — the licensing and supervision of installations, water management and flood protection, contaminated land and waste regimes.
• Sectoral resource law — hunting, fishing, forestry and agriculture where they intersect with conservation duties.
• Animal protection and heritage protection — the legal regimes for animal welfare and for monuments and cultural landscapes.
• Procedure and litigation — standing for environmental associations, judicial review of permits and plans, and the remedies available in environmental cases.

The contents of the current issue illustrate the scope in practice. Among the items Springer listed for the October 2026 issue were case-law reports on a species-protection exception for the shooting of a wolf, on the taking of a golden jackal on the island of Sylt, on the subsequent carrying-out of an environmental impact assessment in a supplementary procedure, on tree-protection statutes and the access-to-court rights of recognised environmental associations, and on development-plan procedures affecting an orchard habitat. Species protection, assessment procedure and associational litigation are, between them, the beating heart of modern German environmental law, and they are the journal's home ground.

Content and Article Types

A typical issue of Natur und Recht combines analytical articles with an extensive case-law section — headed Rechtsprechung in the issue listing — in which decisions of the higher administrative courts (the Oberverwaltungsgerichte and Verwaltungsgerichtshöfe of the German states) and other courts are reported and placed in context. That combination is characteristic of German legal periodicals at the boundary of scholarship and practice: the articles develop doctrine and argue positions, while the case-law reporting keeps practitioners current with decisions that may be difficult to obtain and that directly govern pending permits, plans and proceedings.

For an author, the practical consequence is that the journal rewards work with a clear point of law. Doctrinal analysis of a conservation-law problem, a critical discussion of a line of administrative-court decisions, an examination of a new statutory provision or European requirement and its transposition, or an analysis of how assessment duties operate in a class of projects — these are the natural genres of the journal. Work that is purely scientific in the natural-science sense, without a legal question at its centre, belongs elsewhere; work that reports an environmental dispute without extracting its legal significance will likewise miss the journal's purpose.

Metrics, Indexing and Standing

The journal is indexed in Scopus, and the metrics derived from that indexing should be quoted with their source attached, because different databases draw different pictures of the same German-language title. SCImago-derived listings report a SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) of 0.104 and an h-index of 9 for the title, place it in the fourth quartile (Q4) in the categories Agricultural and Biological Sciences (miscellaneous) and Environmental Science (miscellaneous), and give an overall rank in the lower reaches of the global table. Those category assignments are a database convenience — the journal is a law periodical, and its placement among environmental-science titles says more about classification schemes than about the journal.

OpenAlex, which indexes the title under the source record keyed to ISSN 0172-1631, presents a different and in some ways fuller view: it records some 4,395 works in the journal, cited about 1,233 times in its index, with an h-index of 11 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.06. The difference between the SCImago h-index of 9 and the OpenAlex h-index of 11 is not an error in either source; it is the expected consequence of two indexes covering different citing literatures over different windows, for a journal whose citing community writes largely in German and largely in books, commentaries and other journals that citation databases capture unevenly.

Three interpretive cautions follow. First, citation counts for German legal scholarship systematically understate influence, because the genre's most influential outputs — commentaries, handbooks and court decisions themselves — are poorly represented in citation indexes, and because a decision of a higher administrative court adopting an argument matters more to practice than any citation count. Second, quartile labels imported from science categories should never be quoted for this journal without naming the category and the source; "Q4" describes its position inside an environmental-science comparison set that is not its peer group. Third, the journal's real standing indicators are institutional: continuous publication by Springer since the late 1970s, a monthly cadence sustained into a forty-eighth volume, and the 120.6 thousand downloads Springer reported for 2025. By those measures this is an established, working journal of its field.

The journal does not hold a listing in the Directory of Open Access Journals, as noted above, and no Journal Impact Factor from the Journal Citation Reports could be verified from the sources consulted for this profile; readers who need a specific metric for an evaluation should obtain it from the metric's own publisher rather than from secondary summaries.

Audience and Use

The readership of Natur und Recht is the German-speaking environmental-law community in its full breadth: judges of the administrative courts who decide conservation and planning cases; officials in nature-conservation, water, building and planning authorities who prepare the decisions those courts review; lawyers in firms and in environmental associations who litigate them; in-house counsel in energy, infrastructure and development; and the academic lawyers who teach and write in the field. Environmental consultants and planners who must build legally robust assessments read it to learn where assessments fail in court. For that audience the journal functions simultaneously as a scholarly forum, a case-law reporting service and a professional early-warning system.

For researchers outside the German-speaking world, the journal is a primary source on one of Europe's most developed national systems of environmental law, and on the practical operation of European nature law — the Habitats and Birds Directives above all — at national level. Comparative environmental lawyers will find in its case-law sections a detailed record of how species-protection prohibitions, appropriate assessment and associational standing work in daily administrative practice, which is precisely the level at which European environmental law succeeds or fails.

Submitting and Reading Well

Prospective authors should begin from Springer's pages for the journal, which carry the current submission guidelines, editorial contacts and house requirements; manuscripts are in German, and the conventions of German legal writing — precise statutory reference, engagement with the relevant court decisions, and footnoted apparatus — are the journal's native conventions. Work that engages the journal's core territories, speaks to a live doctrinal or practical question, and reckons honestly with the case law on both sides is the work the journal exists to publish. Because publication is in a subscription hybrid journal, authors with funder open-access obligations should clarify the position with the publisher before submission rather than after acceptance.

Readers verifying the journal's identity should use its two ISSNs — 0172-1631 for print and 1439-0515 for the electronic edition. In external databases, the title is uniquely identified by that ISSN pair across Springer, Scopus-derived listings and OpenAlex, and no other journal shares it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Natur und Recht about? It is a German journal of nature conservation and environmental law, published by Springer. Its scope, in the publisher's own summary, covers the whole law of ecological nature and environmental protection, together with the planning, building, pollution-control, waste, water, soil, hunting, fishing, forestry and agricultural law that bears on nature, and animal-protection and monument-protection law.

What are its ISSNs? Print ISSN 0172-1631; electronic ISSN 1439-0515. The pair appears consistently in the journal's own record, in Scopus-derived listings and in OpenAlex.

Is it open access? It is a hybrid subscription journal: most articles are subscription content, with individual open access articles — Springer counted 223 of them when this profile was researched. No listing for the title appears in the Directory of Open Access Journals.

What metrics does it have? SCImago-derived listings report an SJR of 0.104 and an h-index of 9, with Q4 placement in science categories that do not reflect its legal peer group. OpenAlex records about 4,395 works, about 1,233 citations and an h-index of 11. Springer reported 120.6 thousand downloads in 2025. Each figure belongs to its source and should be cited with it.

Who should read or publish in it? German-speaking environmental and administrative lawyers in courts, authorities, firms, associations and universities; comparative lawyers studying the national operation of European nature law; and authors with German-language doctrinal or case-based work on conservation, planning and environmental law.

How long has it been published? Its volume numbering reached Volume 48 in 2026, placing its first volume in 1979; database coverage windows are shorter and discontinuous, which reflects indexing rather than publication.

Sources consulted for this profile: the journal's page and aims statement on Springer Nature Link (including publishing model, subject classification, latest-issue contents and download figures); OpenAlex source record for ISSN 0172-1631 (works, citations, h-index, host organisation); SCImago-derived listings via Resurchify and ResearchBite (SJR, h-index, categories, publisher form, coverage); the DOAJ search API (no listing for either ISSN); and the journal's existing Journals World record for its stored identifiers. Figures are attributed to their sources in the text; any detail that could not be verified from these sources has been omitted rather than estimated.

Why the Journal Matters Beyond Its Metrics

German environmental law is made in three places: in statutes, in the commentary literature that systematises them, and in the decisions of the administrative courts that apply them to wind farms, roads, river works and housing land. Natur und Recht is one of the few periodicals that works continuously at the third of those levels while remaining in conversation with the first two. Its case-law sections take decisions that would otherwise sit in court databases and give them the professional circulation on which a common practice depends: a ruling on a species-protection exemption in one state is read, within weeks, by the authority in another state preparing a comparable decision, and by the association deciding whether to challenge it. That circulation function — unglamorous, cumulative and largely invisible to citation indexes — is the core of the journal's value to its community, and it is why the journal's forty-eight volumes constitute a working archive of German nature law in action rather than merely a shelf of articles.

For the avoidance of doubt about identity: the journal is a law journal. Its presence in agricultural, biological and environmental-science categories in citation databases is an artefact of classification, and readers who approach it expecting natural-science research articles will not find them. What they will find is the legal operating system of nature conservation in one of Europe's most densely regulated states, documented monthly, in German, since the late 1970s.