The natural and anthropogenic landforms as habitats for endemic plant species convolvulus persicus L

Abstract EN

On the marine field Sărăturile from Danube Delta, naturally grows an endemic plant, Convolvulus persicus L.

(sand bindweed), which uses the Black Sea and Caspian littoral as its exclusive spread area particularly on high beaches and sand dunes.

Up until 1970, the Southern marine half of the field Sărăturile was a natural landscape with mobile sands, dunes, ponds, and marshes.

Then, for protection of Sf.

Gheorghe village against the migration of sands, the Southern half of the field was deeply transformed by afforestation and, thereby, the natural evolution of the landscape was disturbed.

The impact of anthropogenic processes was simply the appearance of a new, human made, relief.

This took the following forms: levelled land with an almost flat morphology, filled marshs, drained ditches and canals, dredges spoil banks, changed internal arrangement of sediment packages, and truncated soils.

Meanwhile, the obvious human impact on coastal landforms has been attenuated by natural and planted vegetation through biogenic processes, which have been changed by aeolian processes that were predominant before.

On some man made landforms, namely dredge spoil banks and levelled land masses, afforested with Eleagnus angustifolia and Hippophaë rhamnoides, located at 2 km away from the active shore, there are few populations of C.

persicus.

This fact seems really unwarrantable and unexpected because this plant occurs very scarcely, even on natural habitats.

In protected areas – Marine Sand Dune Agigea from the South side of the Western Black Sea littoral, where it was discovered for first time in year 1915- keeping its populations in natural conditions is quite difficult.

However, this evidence is a good sign for any practice, which requires in situ or ex situ conservation methods of this rare species of plant life, which has no economic value but is important for a healthy diversity of European flora.