We set out to make a work in 5-6 volumes that would be useful to students, geography teachers and all those who are directly or indirectly interested in the Romanian geographic system, a system gradually acquired, but whose current "face" belongs especially a sequence of the Quaternary. It is based on a fairly extensive documentation viewed analytically, on a lifetime of work in the field and in the laboratory in the physical environment, and on a continuously integrated systemic conception.
The structure of the paper included two volumes of global analysis on each geographical component, then three with a regional character and one for capitalizing on the natural environment in tourism in the field "in vogue" today but also a personal hobby.
Of these, two books - the extremes - have already been published, and in a short time two more will appear - this volume and the one dedicated to hills and plateaus, which not only occupies most of Romania, but sums up and a complexity of geographical aspects imposed by the interference with the mountain and plain environments and where a significant anthropic pressure was exerted.
This book seeks to present, in a synthesis determined by the main destination, the main problems required by the knowledge of several distinct components - climate, water, living things, soils - viewed in systemic interdependence. In this way, although they follow one another in a natural order to the classical geographical approach, the multitude of genetic-evolutionary explanations ensures the connection not only at the chapter level but of the whole work. From the multitude of general and particular aspects, we stopped at those with distinct significance at the level of each environmental component, and within them at a hierarchical staggering and treatment according to their importance in the system. At the same time, we went from an overall analysis (in Romania) to regional and local situations with as many examples as possible through text, maps, diagrams or reflected in photographs.
The completion of some distinct problems from some chapters materialized in several lines of conclusions, these being necessary for the correlation on wider areas of analysis. At the same time, the interdependence between the elements of the natural environment and the different directions of exercising the more and more active influence of man was not omitted. to be treated succinctly, on the general background of the types of geographical environments and problems hazard-vulnerability-risk, protection and conservation.