Nature reserve Oostvaardersplassen has to be opened up to tourism on a larger scale, Flevoland provincial council decided on Wednesday.

The provincial authorities now have to come up with a plan to boost the number of visitors by the summer and will also have to decide what to do about the thousands of deer, horses and wild cattle which graze on the reserve.

The 5,400 hectare reserve is home to 2,600 deer, Konik horses and Heck cattle. Supporters of the move to boost tourism say the overgrazing is producing a bare, unattractive landscape and that the welfare of the animals is at stake.

‘What we want is trees and shrubs. We can only have them if there are fewer big mammals,’ Sjaak Simonse of the fundamentalist Protestant party SGP told the Volkskrant.

According to the reserve’s founding father and ecologist Frans Vera, the plan is likely to be similar to one described in an unpublished document commissioned by the Dutch Forestry Commission – owner of the reserve – which says part of the grassland would become submerged.

The resulting landscape could accommodate tourist accommodation on water but would not have room for large mammals. They would be restricted to the wooded edges of the reserve where they would also damage saplings. ‘Only shooting large numbers of them could prevent this,’ Vera said.

He says this would conflict with the European Natura 2000 directive. ‘If the SGP and VVD propose this it will be against the law,’ the Volkskrant quotes him as saying.