41 annual satellite frames, one per summer, over the Dăbuleni sands of southern Romania. The green that stays has grown by 10,540 hectares, from 2,437 to 12,977 — and what never settled into lasting green is, almost everywhere, the water of the Danube.
Scroll: 41 summers
The sand
The grain is fine and siliceous, with calcium carbonates — 140,000 hectares of sand across southern Oltenia, the country's largest sandy field, in the 2004 inventory cited by the national anti-desertification strategy. The soil holds water badly: under 12 % colloidal clay, humus between 0.10 and 1.60 %, little nitrogen and phosphorus, fair potassium.
The wind does the rest. On such ground, bare or thinly covered, wind erosion shifts into its accelerated form: the whole country counted, in the 2002 estimate cited by the study, 378,000 hectares afflicted by it, 273,000 of them arable and at risk of spreading. Dolj, the county holding Dăbuleni, is listed in the same official study among the severely affected areas, where moving sands occur.
The desert of the headlines — “Sahara Olteniei”, some 80,000 hectares between Calafat and Dăbuleni — is a press label, not a measurement. The official soil map says, in the 2004 inventory, 140,000 hectares of sands; the press says 80,000 of desert. The map keeps both in view and measures, from orbit, what actually happened on a 41,483 hectare slice from their middle.
The summers
Scroll through time: each frame is one real summer, with its date and satellite. The light tint marks where the green arrived to stay.
On 12 September 1984, Landsat 5 sees the sands divided into great field strips, the town in the middle and the Danube below. The staying green — floodplain forest, a few shelterbelts, gardens — covers 2,437 hectares. The rest, in the first photograph, is summer-yellowed ground.
After 1990, irrigation from the old system stops across whole tracts, and people cut the shelterbelts returned to them. Yet from orbit the staying green grows slowly: new plantations take root in the north, and some strips stop yellowing. By 2000 it reaches 4,812 hectares.
In the spring of 2006 the Danube broke the dikes and filled the old bed of Lake Potelu, drained by the communists. Nine months the water stood on the fields. The 17 August 2006 photograph catches 7,172 hectares of water — 6 times the Danube's usual mirror of 1,228 hectares. Fishermen returned from all over the country; then the authorities pumped the water back out.
The last photograph, 3 July 2025: the northern forest blocks have closed, the pivots draw circles by the Danube, the lake bed is field. The green that stays covers 12,977 hectares — 10,540 more than in the first summer. Next, pick a parcel and play it all its summers.
The parcels
Pick a field on the map and press Play: the scene flies over it and plays all 41 summers, while the curve draws each summer by itself. Under the curve, the records say what happened there, in the words of the people who worked the land.
In 1984 this is field — a greenness index of 0.46. In 2000, the curve falls to 0.24: nearly bare ground. Then the crowns touch: from 2009 the parcel never yellows in any summer, and in 2024 the index passes 0.75, closed-forest territory. The independent world forest map lists the block as new forest gain between 2000 and 2012. The species and the planting year were not found in the open records — the closed crown is the only witness.
What the records say: after 1970 the sands were afforested again, and the Sadova–Dăbuleni shelterbelts measured about 520 kilometres; by 2008, 450 remained. About this block — when it was planted and of what species — the open records are silent.
The meadow was green in 1984 too — pasture and gardens. The years show the difference: in 2000 the curve barely touches 0.48; in 2022 and 2024 it stands high, at 0.67 and 0.63. Above the field, the watering rigs draw circles — who paid for them and where their water comes from, the records do not say.
What the records say: the old Sadova–Corabia system, 80,000 hectares on the station's count, was left to fall apart after 1990 — part of it ended as scrap iron. Today's circles show from orbit; their papers show nowhere.
A lake stood here — 47 kilometres of water, drained by the communists to make field. In the 2006 photograph the parcel is water: the index falls to 0.35. Then the dikes are rebuilt, the water is pumped out, and the lake bed turns field again: the green that arrived in 2005 carries through the summer of 2006, when the parcel lay under water. It is the only parcel that has been, in turn, lake, field, lake and field again.
What the records say: locals tell how they fished nine months in the 2006 water — pike, catfish, carp — and how they asked, in 2007, to have their lake filled again. In 2019, an environmental NGO was working on the papers for its ecological reconstruction, with European money.
At Dăbuleni's south-western edge, gardens and orchards are green in nearly every photographed summer since 1984 — the way it goes by the house, where someone works the soil year after year. Their curve barely moves: this is the gauge the other three parcels are measured against. Where someone tends the soil every year, the sand obeys.
What the records say: nothing out of the ordinary — just local habit, the garden by the house, worked year after year.
Which field beat the sand first? The plantation in 2009, the lake bed in 2005 — while the pivots and the town's edge were green from the first photograph, in 1984.
Your year
Type your birth year and the map jumps to that summer: the satellite frame, the green of then, and how much has been added since you have been around. For years before 1984 the map shows the first photograph; for years after 2025, the last.
The people
The first to take the sand seriously were the agronomists. In 1930, at Gârla Mare in Mehedinți county, the Agronomic Research Institute tried the first crops on sand, guided by Gheorghe Ionescu-Șișești; between 1933 and 1935, at Poiana-Mare in Dolj, came the conclusion that still holds: sand imperatively requires chemical and organic fertilisers.
Today's station was born in 1959, as an experimental centre at Bechet, whose principal aim was bringing the sands into cultivation. In 1965 it became an experimental station, in 1970 an amelioration station, and from 1975 the sands' central station, with national responsibility — reorganised as a centre in 2005 and as a research-development station in 2009, today the Dăbuleni Research-Development Station for Growing Plants on Sands, under the Academy of Agricultural and Forestry Sciences.
Its recipe has four ingredients: dune modelling and levelling, fighting wind erosion, ameliorative fertilising, and irrigation with drainage. On that recipe rose the Sadova–Corabia system, 80,000 hectares on the station's count, which carried Danube water onto the sands — the official strategy and the press give somewhat smaller areas, differently defined. In parallel, shelterbelts stitched the field: 520 kilometres around Sadova–Dăbuleni on the 1970s map — black locust above all, the tree that grows fast on sand.
After 1990 the stitching partly came undone: restituted forests cut, belts thinned by chainsaws, irrigation looted for scrap. By 2008 the Sadova–Dăbuleni belts had shrunk to 450 kilometres, and orchards and vineyards had nearly vanished, in the measurements of the Craiova geographers. Yet the forest fund of southern Dolj stayed nearly whole — 220 square kilometres against 225 in 1970 — because the protected areas, Dăbuleni-Grinduri among them, were untouched, and after 1970 the sands were afforested again.
The tension at the map's middle must be stated plainly. A researcher quoted in the press says the sand swallows over 1,000 hectares a year. The map shows the green growing. Both can be true at once: one is an estimate of land covered by sand, the other measures the leaf seen from orbit. An irrigated field greens every summer, even if the soil below may keep growing poorer. The figures keep the leaf's account; soil degradation is documented by the official strategy region-wide, not parcel by parcel.
The harvest
The Dăbuleni sand is a demanding, honest soil: it wants much water, much fertiliser and varieties made for it, and in return it warms fast in spring and ripens early. The station has tried 243 species on it, with over 2,000 varieties and hybrids, and has registered its own: the De Dăbuleni and Dulce de Dăbuleni watermelons, the Viorica and Dăbuleni peanuts, the Aura and Ofelia cowpeas.
The watermelon is the king of the place — the Danube meadow south of town calls itself “the melons' motherland”. Beside it grow wheat, rye, maize, sunflower, alfalfa, grapevine on the low-humus sands, and lavender, by the station's technologies. Sand left bare stays dune; sand that gets water and manure gives harvest.
The climate helps and punishes at once: 11.1 degrees mean a year, 548 millimetres of rain as a multiyear mean, but fallen crooked — normal in May and June, pronounced dryness in July–September, with wide swings from year to year. That is why every parcel's curve shakes in drought years: the green of those summers draws on irrigation, groundwater or stored moisture — the map cannot say which.
The summer
Dăbuleni lies on the Craiova–Bechet–Corabia road, 80 kilometres south of Craiova, the county capital. The town is attested from 5 June 1494, then Recica-Dabului; a town since 2004, with some 10,333 people at the last census. North of it, the Sand Museum keeps, on 12 hectares, the dune the 1970s levellings spared — one of the few places left where feet can still walk the desert of old.
The best season is the summer the map shows: August. Then the eye sees free what the satellite shows — the closed northern forest, the pivots' green circles, the meadow melons. Take your summer from the map and look for it in the landscape: the frame you sent on is the place where you stand.
The method
The map uses 41 annual Landsat frames, one per summer, from 1984 to 2025 — Landsat 5 until 2011 (1999 and 2002 come from Landsat 7), Landsat 8 from 2013, plus Landsat 9 in 2022 and 2025. Each frame is picked cloud-free over the sands and checked for registration: one 1985 frame, shifted by 511 metres, was replaced. The year 2012 is missing — the Landsat archive holds nothing but a striped frame for that summer — and the 2005 frame is glued from two dates, to escape the small clouds the official mask does not see; a few other frames have corners or holes filled from the same year's summer.
One summer's green means a vegetation index over 0.55. A pixel's arrival year is the first year after which at least 80 % of the remaining summers are green — one stray hazy or drowned summer usually moves nothing. Moving the threshold by 0.03 shifts the arrival year by 2 years in the median and by 11 at most for nine in ten; 12.8 in a hundred drop out.
The independent check comes from the world forest map (Hansen/GLAD): the year-2000 forest inside the map — 1924.9 hectares — is recovered at 93.5 %, and the new forest between 2000 and 2012 — 2,023 hectares — falls 60 % on the map's post-2000 arrivals. Forest losses, 562 hectares between 2001 and 2024, sit nearly all on ground that stayed green.
The limits, briefly: arrival years measure the closed crown, not the planting; the new blocks' species and planting year are not known from the open records; satellite green does not mean healed soil — the official strategy documents degradation region-wide, and the map does not measure it parcel by parcel. Every figure comes from the map's data files and is checked automatically at every build.
Landsat Collection 2 Level-2 (USGS/NASA) via Planetary Computer; Copernicus GLO-30; Hansen Global Forest Change v1.12 (UMD/GLAD). Frames, arrival years and curves are computed here; the scripts and logs sit in the map's research folder.
SCDCPN Dăbuleni — the history, soils, climate and varieties from the station's site; the study behind the 2019–2030 national anti-desertification strategy (INCDS, ICPA, ANM); Iordache & Ciuinel 2013, on the forest fund and shelterbelts of southern Dolj.
VICE Romania 2019, on Potelu, Grojdibodu and the sand — quoted with attribution, figures and all; Dăbuleni town hall, for the town's history; the local press, for the Sand Museum.