The assessment of geodiversity – a premise for declaring the geopark Buzăului County (Romania)

Abstract

The geopark Buzăului County does not belong to the Geoparks European Network, as there are numerous governmental, legislative and scientific initiatives in this respect. The geopark is situated in the central-south-eastern part of Romania (in Buzau county) and it has a special potential of geological, geomorphological, biogeographical and anthropic nature, a potential which has to be developed and brought into value. The idea of creating a geopark in this area is relatively recent and it was realized by a series of actions carried on by local authorities in partnership with several institutions, a partnership within which it was accomplished the proposal of a general development framework of the geopark, as well as the launching of a promotion campaign. The scope of this work is to evaluate the geodiversity existing in this space as an important starting point in declaring it as a European geopark, being known that it represents a real “open air museum”. The high values of geodiversity and biodiversity represent special strong points in this respect. The method we used was taken from the specialised literature, suffering a series of adjustments to the specifics of the studied area. In the present format, the method is applied for the first time in the Geography literature, so the values obtained cannot be compared with those obtained by other calculation formulas. Thus, values between 0.20 and 1.91 which resulted cover the entire scale of variables proposed.