Particular attention has been given lately to the study of nature reserves aiming at knowing andmaintaining the present status of conservation of these areas. The areas labelled as reserves are known senclaves of valuable species and are legally protected. There still are, though, areas within differentnature parks or even outside them that preserve certain special floristic elements very similar to naturereserves without having been labelled as such. This is why the authors of this paper wish to drawattention on such an area located near Eibenthal (Mehedinţi County), an area included in the Iron GatesNature Park. The park is located in south-west Romania and it spreads over two administrative units(Caraş-Severin and Mehedinţi counties). The southern limit of the park is marked by the River Danube,which separated Romania from Serbia. The Iron Gates Nature Park is known as the largest nature parkin Romania: it includes 18 nature reserves. The reserves are surrounded by lands that are in privateownership and exploited as orchards, haymaking fields, and forests. These neighbouring areas preserve,in their turn, numerous floristic elements and vegetation aspects very similar to those of a nature reservedue to the maintenance, over a number of years, of the traditional exploitation of the ecosystems in thearea. The study aims at defining the floristic structure of the area aiming at assessing the value of thegene-fund resources and of landscape from the perspective of biodiversity. The research method pertainsto the floristic study. Based on field sampling, the authors define the vascular flora structure. Speciesidentification was done using Flora României; the species are named after Ciocârlan (2009) and Flora Europaea(electronic edition).

flora, Eibenthal area, Iron Gates Nature Park

Presentation: oral