Grasslands, as components of the land fund, can be considered some of the most important natural resources of rural areas, especially in mountain regions focused on subsistence agriculture. The spatial distribution of grasslands is conditioned by the physical-geographical factors, especially the relief, by altitude and the slope of the land. The identification and characterization of grassland areas in the Retezat Mountains, the purpose of the research presented in this paper, was made according to the Corine Land Cover database, 2018 edition. After the identification and location of the grasslands, the second stage of the research consisted in representing them according to the altitude of the study area. For this altitudinal gradient analysis, a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) was used with a spatial resolution of 25 m. In the next step, the grasslands of the area of interest were represented and classified according to the slope of the land, using the slope map generated from the DEM. ArcGIS 10.4 software was used for the analysis and cartographic representation of geospatial data (grassland surfaces, raster maps and other auxiliary vector data). The results obtained in this study demonstrated that the grasslands are well represented in the structure of the land fund of the Retezat Mountains and are unevenly distributed on the predetermined altitudinal levels. Depending on the established slope classes, considering the mountainous nature of the study area, grasslands were identified in variable conditions, in different proportions, on all slope intervals

grasslands, mountain area, altitudinal gradient, land slope

agronomy

Presentation: poster