Braila Islands - Romania

Reference state Formally this land-waterscape consisted in a large (1376 square kilometers) floodplain which has been extended in the northern half of the Inland Danube delta (Fig. 1 & 2), between a network of river arms and lateral up to the river terrace. Three major hydro-geomorphic units have been developed over time: i) Big Island of Braila with a surface of 666 square kilometers; ii) Small Islands of Braila (SIBr) with a surface of 210 square kilometers and iii) lateral floodplain of 500 square kilometers (Fig. 12). Before the campaign for agricultural land reclamation (1950?s) the area contained a large number of shallow lakes, ponds and marshes, linked to each other by natural or man made channels and the entire network of freshwater ecosystems was connected to the river arms. The aquatic ecosystem network has covered a total surface of 619 square kilometers and has provided annually for the fishery sector about 3?4 k tons of fish yield. About 275 square kilometers of land area has been flooded annually for 6?7 months. Such type of flooded area has provided a wide range of excellent habitats for spawning, breeding, nesting and feeding for a large number of fish and bird species. They also functioned as very productive wet grasslands, providing significant quantities of hay or reed mace. The remaining land surface of 482 square kilometers has been flooded only for 2?3 months per year during the main river pulse (April to June). The hydrology of this large land area has allowed the establishment of natural alluvial forests (about 115 square kilometers) as well as practicing extensive and traditional agriculture on variable surface (50? 100 square kilometers or even more) according with the variation in the river?s hydrologic pulse. Current state By the end of 1960s the IBr land-waterscape was to a very high extent affected from a structural and functional point of view. Thus 1073 square kilometers of polders were established from which the largest one of 666 square kilometers in Big Island of Braila. The cost for establishing such large polders has exceeded nine hundreds millions USD (Vadineanu? unpublished data). Most part of permanent water bodies and floodplains has been converted into highly energy subsidized crop production systems (Fig. 10 & 11). Total subsidies in terms of concentrated energy varied from one to another crop production system according with the type of crop (corn, rice, wheat) and soil characteristics and that was equivalent to 1.5 up to 2.5 tones of diesel fuel per hectare per year. Since 1990 these state owned farming systems have collapsed, as was the case for all those (78 per cent) created in the LDWS, obviously due the loss of the biological foundation necessary for their maintenance. Currently we still find a significant amount of wetlands consisting of: a) the Small Island of Braila wetlands (SIBr) with a total surface of 210 square kilometers and b) the floodplains between riverbanks and dikes of almost 93 square kilometers (Fig. 12). The SIBr wetlands extends along a Danube river stretch of 62 kilometers long between kilometer 175 downstream and kilometer 237 upstream and consists in a set of 10 islets and a network of river arms and channels.