Mount Cozla is a well-individualized relief unit within the municipality of Piatra Neamţ, the city is surrounding the mountain to the west, south and east, and to the north it is bordered by the commune of Gârcina. Due to the natural values identified here and the community's desire to preserve them, we proposed the establishment of an urban natural area.
This initiative is part of the Urban Nature Network, an association founded in 2023 as a result of the collaboration between several civic organizations for the protection of urban nature and for the integration of the principles of nature conservation and biodiversity in the planning and administration of cities.
Cozla Mountain is located in the Neamțului Mountains, a subunit of the Stânișoara Mountains, part of the Eastern Carpathians, in the Bistrita river basin, bordered by its tributaries, in the eastern part of the Borzogheanu stream valley, and to the north and west, it is framed by the Cuejdiu stream . The total area of the proposed urban natural area is 264.81 ha.
The maximum altitude reaches 656 m in Vârful Trei Caldări and 651 m in Vârful Cozla south of the proposed natural protected area.
The Cozla Mountain protected natural area is a typical example of a forest massif with trees over 100 years old..
The fauna of the proposed natural protected area Cozla Mountain is very varied, having been identified so far approximately 80 species of invertebrates of which 4 are protected, 11 species of protected amphibians, 6 species of protected reptiles, 55 species of birds of which 33 are protected and 26 mammal species of which 19 are protected.
Some of these conservation-value forest ecosystems have already been affected by logging and are still threatened by the lack of a protection regime.
At the same time, Mount Cozla is particularly important from a geomorphological point of view, because within Mount Cozla there is a natural monument, unique in Romania at the highest point of Mount Cozla, called "Trei Căldări" (Three Buckets). The wind buckets on Cozla are carved into the Kliwa sandstone in the form of spherical excavations with an opening diameter between 0.80-0.90 m and a depth of 0.60-0.80 m.
These excavations were formed by the destructive action of wind (eolization) in the conditions of a silvo-tundra climate, harsh and cold with strong winds, little vegetation and a thin and discontinuous blanket of snow. In these environmental conditions, the disaggregation of the sandstone takes place, in its more gel areas, and in the direction of the dominant, particularly strong winds, the material was picked up and removed particle by particle. This phenomenon was a long-lasting one and took place 20,000 years ago, in the first part of the Quaternary (Pleistocene).
In addition, the conservation importance of Mount Cozla is given by the great diversity of fossil fauna found especially in the Cozla Fossil Point Nature Reserve, located south of the proposed protected natural area.
The fossil fauna discovered on the Cozla mountain lived in the Upper Eocene (30 million years ago) and as a whole, it is similar to the fauna of all Euro-Asian basins and corresponds to a well-individualized paleobiotope, clearly distinct from the other Eocene and Miocene paleobiotopes. Of the 102 species identified on Cozla, 53 are new to the Oligocene fossil fauna of Romania and 32 new to science.
