Grassland habitat degradation intensified in the last century worldwide and in Europe. In Romania, substantial areas of biodiverse grassland habitats that persisted due to small-scale farming are now threatened by recent land-use intensification. However, data regarding the deviation from grazing optimum, essential for management plans encompassing both socioeconomic sustainability and environment conservation, are not yet available. To fill this gap, detailed statistics of the stocking rate and its deviation from optimum were generated by spatial modeling techniques. A toolbox was developed to assess such deviations inside or outside the Natura 2000 Network of protected areas. The analysis covered an area of 33529.42 km 2 , corresponding to all the Romanian permanent grasslands within the land parcel identification system. The results indicate that over half of this area is degraded, mostly from overgrazing. Less than 10% is not impacted by inadequate livestock density. Of the national grassland area, 17.34% is included within the Natura 2000 protected sites, indicating the substantial overlapping of agricultural and protection activities. For this category, the degraded area is slightly lower than at the national level (50.34% vs. 52.45%). These results can be applied for environmental conflict anticipation and optimal management of grassland habitats to achieve both socioeconomic and conservation objectives.
Purpose
This paper studies the relationships between air pollutants (PM
10
, PM
2.5
, N
2
O) and different diseases (tumors, skin and respiratory) and the factors influencing air pollutant emissions in Romania.
Methods
The methods are Toda-Yamamoto procedure of non-causality Granger test, grey relational analysis and logarithmic mean Divisia index method (LMDI).
Results
Air pollutants intensities dropped significantly over 2008–2017 period due to structural changes. The only economic activity that showed an increase both in volume and intensity of air pollutants, despite a downward trend of farming activities output is agriculture. Technology improvements play a significant role in mitigation of PM
2.5
emissions and a moderate role in mitigation of PM
10
emissions. For N
2
O emissions technology used contributed to an increase of N
2
O intensities.
Conclusion
Health policy makers should address the issue of technology improvements and mitigation of agriculture emissions to improve health of individuals and air quality.
In general, the elaboration of the synthesis of water quality in Romania is based on the processing of a large volume of information coming from primary analytical data collected with a constant frequency by the organisms with a specific role in water quality monitoring. This study proposes a novel methodology for multi-criteria analysis aiming to evaluate the degradation state of lake ecosystems. The cornerstone of the newly presented methodology is a geographic information system (GIS) automated tool, involving the assessment of potential degradation sources affecting the watershed that supply the lakes with water. The methodology was tested by performing an analysis on 30 lakes in Romania. The lakes belong to different geographical areas, owing various natural specific conditions and were selected to fit to various types and specific local conditions. The calculation of the WRASTIC-HI (Wastewater–Recreation–Agriculture–Size–Transportation–Industry–Cover–Hazard Index) revealed that, out of 30 lake ecosystems selected as the case study, two lakes were fully degraded, 24 lakes were semi-degraded, and four were in a natural state. The four lakes characterised by a natural state are located in mountainous regions or in the Danube Delta. The results obtained on the selected lakes proved that the proposed index calculation corresponded in all case studies to the real field situation, highlighting thus the accuracy of the assessing process and increased advantages of the assessment’s automation.
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