Conservative status of freshwater habitats of European community importance from Romania

In this paper we present the conservative status of the freshwater habitats based on available
data that were resulted from the first monitoring of conservative status of the habitats and
species of the Community interest from Romania. This has been achieved during the 2011 -
2015 period as an obligation arising from Article 11 of the Habitats Directive (HD) in order to
report the summarized and analysed results to the European Commission, according to Article
17 of the directive that requires Member States to report every six years the progress made
with the implementation of the HD. As a consequence of geographical position and diversity
of landforms, on the Romanian territory overlap five biogeographical regions: Alpine,
Continental, Pannonian, Steppic, and the Black Sea (Pontic). The great heterogeneity of
landscape is reflected by the diversity of wildlife and natural habitats, including 10 freshwater
habitat types of Community importance. The assessment of the conservation status of all
freshwater habitat types was carried out following the methodology agreed by the European
Commission and Member States. The results, included as part of Romania's first 6-yearly
report to the EU from 2013, show that the conservative status is favourable for 8 habitat types,
and unfavourable/inadequate for 2 habitat types. Regarding to the ”31A0 Transylvanian hotspring lotus beds” priority habitat that occur only in Romania, Pannonian biogeographical
Region, its conservative status changed suddenly from favourable before 2013 to
unfavourable/bad starting with 2014 because the natural water source of the Peţea Lake was
heavy disturbed by recent anthropogenic activities.