Pannonic salt steppes and saltmarshes

Description (English)

Salt steppes and saltmarsh meadows of the Pannonic plain and its satellite basins. Large expanses of salt steppe form an open landscape of short-grass swards on slightly elevated ground (unit E6.211) and of rills (units E6.213, E6.214), eroded shallow depressions with bare or sparsely vegetated saline soils, dry or moist in spring and prone to white salt efflorescences. Deeper rills, with less ephemeral water, support medium-tall saline meadows (unit E6.212). This unit is represented by the alliance Beckmannion eruciformis in the Carpathians and includes small-area fragments. Waterholes that dot the surface harbour brackish aquatic vegetation (unit C1.523) and are fringed by tall emergents (units C3, D5, in particular halophile communities of C3.27); their drying muds, subjected to prolonged immersion, are colonised by pioneer formations of Chenopodiaceae (unit D6.161) or crypsoid grasses (unit E6.23). These ensembles of communities are mainly represented in the central Pannonic plain, east of the Tisza, in the Danube lowlands of the Tisza-Danube interfluve and in the Neusiedler See (Lake Ferto) basin. Smaller relics persist in the Danube lowlands of Slovakia, in the eastern Pannonic plain and Transylvanian basin of Romania, in the Voivodina and have survived until recently in Moravia, where they may now be extinct. Outside of the Pannonic basin, western outposts of the continental salt steppes and saltmarshes (unit E6.2) are also known from the Bohemian basin and from isolated intermontane basins of the southwestern Balkan peninsula; the Bohemian communities have long been extinct; the extremely localized Balkanic ones, although equally related to the Pannonic and Pontic formations, have, for convenience, been includedhere, since they share their extreme western location within the Eurasian salt steppe complex. Species composition depends on two gradients – soil moisture and salination. Important species are Chenopodium chenopodioides, Crypsis aculeata, Spergularia salina, Scirpus pumilus, Juncus gerardi and Melilotus macrorrhizus.

Source: EUNIS habitat classification