Abstract The development of a method of sustainable land use balanced with an ecosystem stability parallel to intensive cultivation was the aim of a restoration project in northwest Germany. The results of a substantial experiment in landscape ecology, conducted on a 1000-ha area in the past decade, demonstrate that small-sized, unused patches and linear structures connecting them are important parts of a protective concept for nature conservation. Thus, a restoration of semi-natural water courses with temporarily inundated floodplains, and other linear landscape structures, such as dam hedges, have a variety of functions, not only as paths of migration, habitats and protection against substance transports, but also as sites of active elimination of a nutrient surplus and other substances. Buried ecological potential, in the form of seeds of past communities, regenerates as soon as barriers to adequate survival have been removed. Restoration, creating and connecting a variety of smaller ecosystems within a landscape not only will be an important contribution to stabilizing floristic and faunistic assemblages and to the elimination of a nutrient surplus, but will result in significant improvements to ecosystem functioning of nearby intensively cultivated landscapes. However, an unalterable precondition for sustainable land-use must be the adjustment of cultivation to the carrying capacity of the land.