Romania

Data

• earth.unibuc.ro is a great starting place (Romanian language) for Romanian geodata: articles, tutorials, resources, and much more
• the major commercial vendors include:
  • Geo Strategies, main data page is GIS & Map Data for Romania
    • their DEM (DTM) is available in a 100m grid
  • Geosystems Romania, also a reseller for ESRI, ERDAS, LizardTech, Trimble, EuroMap products. The are reported to sell vector basemap including roads, railways, etc.
  • InteliGIS
  • Finsiel
  • NACLR - ANCPI (National Agency for Cadastre and Real Estate)
    • they sell high-resolution aerial photos, which are available for approximately 10% of Romania, and the price is around 40$/tile
    • each tile is 5040x5040 pixels, 0.5 meter resolution, so that's 2.5x2.5 km
    • detail is great and accuracy is reportedly extremely good, but color quality is poor: the images look nearly desaturated
• there are a number of free local datasets, but not yet any kind of directory for them, so they can only be located through word of mouth
• contact: Vasile Craciunescu [vasile33@yahoo.com] is the guy to ask about all sorts of data, especially DEMs
• contact: Dragoş Lipan [dlipan@yahoo.com] is a guy to ask about data for forestry or parks
• free ASTER DEMs provide some spotty coverage of the country
  • see ASTER coverage snapshot (524k JPEG) assembled by Vasile
  • of course, these have a usual accuracy issues with ASTER, including gaps and overlapping regions which differ considerably
  • detail, where it exists, is quite good - see a close-up of the northern part of the country (1 MB JPEG)
• LandSat imagery: GLCF ESDI now has LandSat ETM+ scenes for most of the country

Law

• reportedly, there is a very old law on the books in Romania which says that all detailed maps of the country (1:5000 or better?) are national secrets and forbidden to possess - while bizarre, it does not apply to modern data such as vectors, only to things which resemble a conventional map
• also reported: "There are other laws about aerial photography. Any kind of photo or video obtained from the air (flying vehicle) must have written approval by the Ministry of Defense (MApN) at least 2 weeks prior. Those who take pictures/videos without approval risk heavy fines and possibly jail. Pilots of aircraft from which such photo/video was taken risk the same, and also having their pilot's license revoked. (regardless of their implication)."

GPS

• Proiectul România Digital (PRD)
  • The Digital Romania Project, site in Romanian only)
  • The project plans to provide a central site which will gather together as much as possible of the data existing for the country, then provide it in a form usable by Garmin GPS units, so that there is a basemap to make the GPS devices useful.

Bucureşti

• Some aerial images of Bucureşti appeared on the net after a promotional blimp was flown over the city in June 2004
• There is also a satellite photo of Bucharest (resolution 1m/pixel, 11448x16624, 200MB JPEG) which is floating around the internet, although it is assumed to be not in the public domain.  I found a copy and made a derived version with most of the clouds and cloud shadows fixed.  Thumbnails shown at right, but full file isn't online here because of the unknown rights.

Constanţa

• The SpaceEyes3D commercial terrain tool has a number of free demonstration datasets, which includes a model of Constanţa's city center.  It includes an orthophoto, road centerlines, and extruded footprints for the large buildings.  Data source is www.geoimage.fr

Braşov

• vrbrasov.ro hosts an interactive map and stunning QTVR images of Braşov

Projections

• there are a few unusual projections often encountered with Romanian data
• Stereo 70 ("stereo şaptezeci")
  • "Hristow" Oblique Stereographic, units are meters
  • Ф₀ = 46° North and λ₀ = 25° East of Greenwich
  • False Easting = False Northing = 500 km
  • m₀ = 0.999750
  • uses the "Dealul Piscului 1970" Datum (Krassowsky 1940 ellipsoid)
  • As a projection file: stereo70.prj
• Gauss-Kruger ("GK")
  • GK is a German ancestor of UTM; like UTM, it is a set of Transverse Mercator zones
  • Zone 4 or 5 was used for Romania
  • Zone 4 is: False Easting = 4500000, False Northing = 0, Central_Meridian = 21, Scale_Factor = 1, Latitude of Origin = 0
  • Pulkovo 1942 datum (Krasovsky 1940 ellipsoid)

VTP Scenery

• 2003.06, created 2 VTP scenes: all of Romania, and the Giurgiu-Bucureşti area
  • from GLOBE elevation and JPL LandSat7 false-color from their WMS
  • put a snapshot of Giurgiu-Bucureşti on the Screenshots page
  • a couple snapshots of the whole country terrain:
  • 
• as of 2003.08.19, there are 37 non-bouncing VTP recipients in Romania
• Braşov area: Geo (24.64, 45.14), (1.47, 1.03) is a 120*120 km area, suitable for a 4k*4k texture of 30m LandSat
• City of Baia Mare and environs, which is now in the BT repository
  • UTM zone 34, elevation 17.5 km square
  • elevation of size 2049 (8.5 meter grid interpolated from local contours)
  • imagery 2048*2048 from false-color satellite image

Misc. notes on Romanian national parks and protected areas

• National Park Piatra Craiului
  • had an online park map server around 2003-4 (?) at http://map.pcrai.ro/
  • extents are given as 45°22'03" şi 45°35'11" latitudine şi 25°07'38" şi 25°23'18" longitudine
  • extracted LS image at (25.127222, 45.367500), (0.261111, 0.218888)
  • this is roughly 20 * 24 km
  • at 30m resolution, LS images don't need to be larger than 678 x 814 for an area that size - hence parcul_pc_v3_1024.jpg (right)
  • CLCP (large carnivore project) has a base in Zarneşti, that town visible in the upper right of the image
  • the IT folks at the park had some elevation data at some point, from their animated GIF of a shaded rendering, low resolution but looks better than 1km, probably at least a 500m grid
• parks extents shown in Encarta (8 parks)
  • National Park Retezat, Cheile Nerei-Beuşnita, Pietrosul Mare, Cornedei-Ciungii Balasinii
  • in Danube basin: Sfîntu Gheorghe-Palade-Perisor, Pădurea Caraorman, Roşca-Buhaiova, Pădurea Letea
• not in Encarta:
  • Vânători Neamţ, Parcul Natural Lunca Mureşului, Parcul Natural Porţile de Fier
• national agency MMGA (Ministerul Mediului şi Gospodarii Apelor)
  • provides some SHP files for all 18 official parks, including park boundaries!
  • coordinate system is Gauss-Kruger zone 4 or 5, Pulkovo 1942 datum
• some NGOs which might be able to point to data
  • REC is the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe which has a local office, REC Romania
  • OGA is the Organizatia Geoecologica ACCENT [oga.ro] (Braşov), member of Green Maps
  • a REC report says that OGA is working on development of an "emotional map" of protected areas?
  • Pro Natura is another important NGO which used to have a database of protected areas (now broken?)
• a commonly reported factoid:
  • "Romania has 13 national parks, 371 geologic monuments, 46 scientific reserves, and 18 protected landscapes. All together there are 586 protected areas"
  • however, nowhere is a list of these 586
  • a Council of Europe page from 2002 even claims "827 protected areas, covering 5.2% of the country's area" (!!)
• Protected Areas in Romania according to IUCN norms lists:
  • 43 Scientific reserves, 12 National Parks, 135 Natural monuments, 375 Nature reserves, 18 Protected Landscapes, 3 Biosphere Reserve, 1 World Natural Heritage Site, 1 Ramsar site
    • nature reserves broken down into 122 botany reserves, 15 zoological, 65 geological, 58 speological, 52 paleontological, 51 forestry, 155 mixed
  • that makes 588 total
• The UNEP-WCMC has the WDPA (World Database on Protected Areas)
  • as of 2003.08.17, it listed:
    • 157 total: 1 Biosphere Reserve, 1 Botanical Reserve, 1 Flora Reserve, 11 Forest Reserve, 15 National Park, 2 Natural Monument, 120 Nature Reserve, 6 Scenic Reserve
    • of these, 53 have a map coordinate (single point)
  • as of 2005.04.14, it lists:
    • 184 total: 1 Botanical Reserve, 1 Flora Reserve, 14 Forest Reserve, 17 National Park, 2 Natural Monument, 1 Nature Park, 142 Nature Reserve, 6 Scenic Reserve
    • it's hard to tell with the current website how many of these have coordinates
  • there don't appear to be any polygonal areas for Romania, only points
• there are at least 20 kinds of "protected area", as in this table (pdf)

• map of Karst Areas of Romania
• detailed overview of forestry in Romania (as of 1997)