Romania is one of the countries with a long tradition in biodiversity conservation. Regulations on nature protection included in Romanian law were first signaled in the 15th century. Although in the inter-bellum and communist periods the regulations were relatively fewer and the inflexible legislative framework had no focus on conservation, biodiversity and natural capital conservation happened by itself. After 1989, although there have been numerous legislative amendments and an opening concerning the signing of international conventions, the transposition of European biodiversity conservation legislation and support of large amounts of money; the efficiency of conservation is increasingly weaker. The Convention on Biodiversity (CBD), signed by Romania in 1992 was ratified by European Union in 1993. Since 2007 Romania, as an EU state member, must comply with commitments to the Convention in both positions. Natura 2000 network of protected areas is the key legal instrument in applying the sustainability principles to biodiversity. In order to ensure that the existing biodiversity is maintained, Romania has developed three National Strategies and an action Plan for Biodiversity Conservation. In all three, Romanian experts settled: the priority objectives, the priority areas for nature and biodiversity conservation, the ways of reforming the legal and institutional framework; the cost estimate to achieve the major objectives. The estimated budget necessary to implement the action plan is about 1,508,175,000 € out of which a small portion was spent, with very low efficiency.

The present study is focused on the temporal and spatial distribution of red listed lichen (RLL) species identified in both non-protected areas (NPAs) and protected areas (PAs) in Romania. This study revealed different scenarios of RLL based on two major patterns: (1) the fate of RLL before and after their designation in the red list in Romania and (2) the fate of RLL before and after the designation of PAs in Romania. Generally, the occurrences of RLL were well represented in time and space in both NPAs and PAs through geomorphological and biogeographical units. In particular, the occurrences of RLL were well represented, especially in hilly areas within PAs before and after their official designation, and this was an important aspect over a long period of time. Although NPAs were not less important regarding the occurrences of RLL species, it was observed that they followed the same pattern as PAs, namely, they were well represented in hilly areas and over a long period of time. The bioregions were significant for RLL species in both NPAs (continental and stepic) and PAs (continental, panonic, and stepic). As a significant finding of this study, NPAs and PAs should be subjected to an adequate conservation regime due to their biotical traditional heritage.

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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.