Moldova Geography, Climate & Nature

Moldova is a landlocked country of 33,843 square kilometres in Eastern Europe, bordered by Romania along the Prut to the west and by Ukraine to the north, east and south; most of its territory is the historic Bessarabia between the Prut and the Dniester, and the narrow strip east of the Dniester, 4,163 square kilometres, is the breakaway Transnistria. The land is a rolling plateau of Carpathian origin: the Dniester Hills in the north, the Bălți steppe and the middle Prut valley, the central Codri massif whose name means forests and whose Bălănești Hill at 430 metres is the country's highest point, and the small Bugeac plain in the south. Rivers are the Dniester, the Prut and their tributaries, the Răut and the Bîc among them.

Chișinău, on the Bîc in the centre, has over 567,000 people in the city and a third of the country in the municipality; Bălți is the northern town, Tiraspol the Transnistrian capital, Comrat the Gagauz one, and Soroca on the Dniester a few kilometres from Ukraine. The only airport with scheduled flights is Chișinău's, 13 kilometres south-east of the centre; overnight trains run to Bucharest and Kyiv.

Landslides are the main natural hazard, in spring and autumn; there is no coast, no mountain and no wilderness, only a very old agricultural landscape.

Moldova's climate is moderately continental, softened by the nearness of the Black Sea: mildly cold in autumn and winter, relatively cool in spring and summer by the encyclopaedia's account, with summers long and warm at an average of about 20 °C and winters relatively mild and dry with January averaging −4 °C. Annual rainfall runs from around 600 millimetres in the north to 400 in the south and varies greatly from year to year; long dry spells are common, the heaviest rain falls in early summer and again in October, and the country counts 300 days of sunshine, which is why the vines are there.

The Canadian advisory's hazards are landslides during spring and autumn; the British advisory adds nothing climatic. Streets and pavements are poorly maintained, which matters more in ice and mud than the temperatures do.

Best Destinations by Month has the practical reading.

Moldova is an agricultural landscape from border to border, and its natural inheritance survives in the forest islands of the centre and the river cliffs of the Dniester and Răut. The Codru reserve, established in 1971, protects 5,177 hectares of the Codri forest ecosystem in the central hills; the Orhei National Park of 2013, the country's only one, protects the Răut gorge and the cliffs of Old Orhei; and the Dniester bank at Saharna and Țipova holds the monasteries' woods. The encyclopaedia pages opened for this page carry no species inventory for the country beyond a single snail recorded only in Codru, and none is invented here.

What can be said is structural: the codri are the last of the oak and beech forest that once covered the plateau; the steppe of Bălți and the Bugeac is ploughed; and the vineyards, 148,500 hectares of them, are the country's dominant managed habitat.

No species-level survey was consulted beyond the sources named in the data file.

This page says only what its sources say, and on Moldova's wildlife they say almost nothing: the Codru reserve is the single known Moldovan site of one gastropod, and the birds of the Dniester and Prut wetlands, the roe deer and boar of the codri and the storks on every village pole are in the country as they are across the border, but no sentence opened for this page names them, so they stay out. Old Orhei and the Codru reserve are where a naturalist would start.

The practical zoology is the advisories': ticks and tick-borne encephalitis in the countryside, and livestock and horse-drawn carts on unlit roads after dark.