Effects of oil pollution on vegetation, potentially useful indicator species for rehabilitation

In Romania there are many types of historical oil soil contamination the most important beingthe land ones in Prahova County. The damage caused by this pollution may be permanent and takes a long time to remedied, sometimes requiring the ecological reconstruction of the polluted area. A major role in the remediation of soils polluted with oil plays the vegetation, some plant communities having a higher capacity to adapt and accelerate the process of mineralization of oil, hurrying decontamination. The goal of this paper was to realize an inventory of the oil-contaminated zones in Prahova County (historical oil pollution areas), to study the vegetation cover structure in selected representative sites and to identify potentially useful indicator species in terms of the ability to grow in extreme conditions for ecological restoration and remediate contaminated soils. Inventory of oil contaminated areas and historical data collection related to polluted areas and type of pollution were recorded. The vegetation studies have also been carried out in these areas. The richness of species in areas contaminated with oil is low (44 plant species – Tintea respectively 49 – Pisculești, forming two different plant communities structure (Jaccard similarity index of about 1%) with low biomass production and productivity (338 DW/sqm). The number of nitrogen fixing plants is higher at Pisculeşti (6) compared to Ţintea (4) which can be explained by the fact that the nitrogen soil content at Pisculeşti is much less than at Ţintea. The conclusion was that the plants recommended for use in the reconstruction of historically polluted areas with oil, must have a genetic structure that enables them to adapt a high plasticity in terms of metabolism and root absorption, availability of absorption at radicular level in relation with chemical nitrogen forms. The most important are the plant species that develop the nitrogen fixation formations with different bacterial species.

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