Water Framework Directive scientific and technical support related to ecological status - summary report of JRC activities in 2015

This report summarises the scientific and technical contributions of DG JRC to the implementation of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) related to ecological status covering the year 2015. JRC is providing long-term support aimed at achieving a common understanding of good status and potential, the principal environmental objectives of the WFD. An important aspect of this work is the WFD intercalibration exercise as required in WFD Annex V 1.4.1, ensuring that classification methods are compliant with the Directive’s requirement and give comparable result, thus establishing a level playing field for the measures that need to be taken my Member States to achieve good status or potential. JRC scientific and technical support is carried out in the framework of the WFD “common implementation strategy” (CIS) mandated by the EU Water Directors, where JRC is responsible for the working group on Ecological Status (ECOSTAT), working with experts from all Member States and key stakeholder organisations. Main issues covered in 2015 were intercalibration of good ecological status, intercalibration of good ecological potential, nutrient standards, typology, and hydromorphology. A new CIS work programme has been agreed upon by the Water Directors in which the JRC will continue to play a key role in the ECOSTAT working group for the years 2016-2018.JRC.H.1-Water Resource

Revision of the consistency in Reference Criteria application in the phase one of the European Intercalibration Exercise

This document is produced within the cross GIG working group on Reference con-ditions and is a final report on the consistency check survey, with an assessment of implications and recommendations for the application of reference conditions during IC phase two.JRC.H.5-Rural, water and ecosystem resource

Assessing the Ecological Status of European Rivers and Lakes Using Benthic Invertebrate Communities: A Practical Catalogue of Metrics and Methods

The Water Framework Directive requires that the ecological status of surface waters be monitored and managed if necessary. A central function in ecological status assessment has the Biological Quality Elements-organisms inhabiting surface waters-by indicating human impact on their habitat. For benthic invertebrates, a wide array of national methods are used, but to date no comprehensive summary of metrics and methods is available. In this study, we summarize the benthic invertebrate community metrics used in national systems to assess the ecological status of rivers, (very) large rivers, and lakes. Currently, benthic invertebrate assemblages are used in 26 national assessment systems for rivers, 13 assessment systems for very large rivers, and 21 assessment systems for lakes in the EU. In the majority of systems, the same metrics and modules are used. In the Red Queen's race of ecosystem management this may be a disadvantage as these same metrics and module likely depict the same stressors but there is growing evidence that aquatic ecosystems are subject to highly differentiated, complex multiple stressor impacts. Method development should be fostered to identify and rank impacts in multi-stressor environments. DNA-based biomonitoring 2.0 offers to detect stressors with greater accuracy-if new tools are calibrated

A Novel Approach for Deriving Nutrient Criteria to Support Good Ecological Status: Application to Coastal and Transitional Waters and Indications for Use

A huge variability exists in nutrient concentrations boundaries set for the water (WFD) and the marine strategy framework directives (MSFD), as revealed by a survey to EU member states (MS). Such wide variation poses challenges when checking policy objectives compliance and for setting coherent management goals across European waters. To help MS achieve good ecological status (GES) in surface waters, different statistical approaches have been proposed in a Best Practice Guide (BPG; CIS Nutrients Standards Guidance) for establishing suitable nutrient boundaries. Here we used the intercalibrated results from the WFD for the biological quality element phytoplankton to test the applicability of this BPG for deriving nutrient boundaries in coastal and transitional waters. Overall, the statistical approaches proved adequate for coastal lagoons, but are not always robust to allow deriving nutrient boundaries in other water categories such as estuaries, in transitional waters, or some coastal water types. The datasets available for analysis provided good examples of the most common problems that might be encountered in these water categories. Similar issues have been found in freshwater environments, for which solutions are proposed in the BPG and which are demonstrated here for coastal and transitional waters. The different approaches available and problems identified can be useful for supporting the derivation of nutrient concentrations boundaries both for the Water and the MSFDs implementation

Deriving nutrient criteria to support 'good' ecological status in European lakes: An empirically based approach to linking ecology and management

European water policy has identified eutrophication as a priority issue for water management. Substantial progress has been made in combating eutrophication but open issues remain, including setting reliable and meaningful nutrient criteria supporting ʽgoodʼ ecological status of the Water Framework Directive. The paper introduces a novel methodological approach - a set of four different methods - that can be applied to different ecosystems and stressors to derive empirically-based management targets. The methods include Ranged Major Axis (RMA) regression, multivariate Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression, logistic regression, and minimising the mismatch of classifications. We apply these approaches to establish nutrient (nitrogen and phosphorus) criteria for the major productive shallow lake types of Europe: high alkalinity shallow (LCB1; mean depth 3–15 m) and very shallow (LCB2; mean depth

European Freshwater Ecosystem Assessment: Cross-walk between the Water Framework Directive and Habitats Directive types, status and pressures

The EU policies on the freshwater environment and nature and biodiversity are closely linked. The aims of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) and the Habitat Directive (HD) are to achieve good status for water bodies (WFD) and for habitats and species (HD) respectively. The types of rivers and lakes and their ecological status and pressures under the WFD are not directly comparable to the conservation status and threats for freshwater habitats and species under the HD (EC 2011a). The objective of this study has been to explore the possibilities of linking WFD and HD information on types of water bodies and habitats, and their status, pressures and measures, using WISE WFD information on types, ecological status, pressures and measures (EEA 2012, ETC-ICM 2012) and HD information on habitat types, conservation status and threats (EC 2007). The results may be used as input to the EEA Freshwater Ecosystem Assessment in 2015, and also for future European assessments of specific objectives, status and trends for various types of rivers and lakes after the reporting of the WFD 2nd RBMPs and the next HD article 17 reporting. The outcome may also be used as a basis for discussions of the potential and limitations for WFD and HD synergies in terms of monitoring programmes, assessment systems and measures to improve status. The general methodology used in this report is to analyse data and information reported by Member States on WFD types, ecological status and pressures in river and lake water bodies and on Habitats Directive freshwater habitats and their conservation status and threats. The major data sources used are the WISE-WFD database and the HD Article 17 databaseJRC.H.1-Water Resource

Estimating river nutrient concentrations consistent with good ecological condition: More stringent nutrient thresholds needed

Nutrient pollution remains one of the leading causes of river degradation, making it important to set thresholds that support good ecological condition, which is the main objective of managing Europe's aquatic environment. A wide range of methods has been used by European member states to set river nutrient thresholds in the past, and these vary greatly among countries, even for similar river types. In some countries, thresholds have been set using expert judgement or the statistical distribution of nutrient concentrations. Application of such thresholds creates problems for planning strategies to achieve good ecological status and for managing transboundary river basins. An alternative approach is to examine the statistical relationship between nutrient concentration and one, or more, biological variables. Such relationships can then be used to inform decisions by water managers. We use such 'ecology-based' approaches (univariate regression and mismatch analyses) to derive nutrient thresholds for several river types in Central Europe. Our analysis focused on soluble reactive phosphorus (SRP) and total nitrogen (TN), two variables which were responsible for significant variation (40–55%) in river benthic floras. In this study, for the first time, river nutrient thresholds are estimated using both macrophytes and phytobenthos (EQRs) separately and in combination, calculated as the minimum and the average of the EQRs of the two sub-elements. The resulting thresholds supporting good ecological status range from 21 to 42 µg/L SRP and 0.9–3.5 mg/L TN for the low alkalinity lowland river type, and 32–90 µg/L SRP and 1.0–2.5 mg/L TN for the low alkalinity mid-altitude river type. These targets are compared to the values set by member states. We demonstrate that some national nutrient thresholds fall within the range of predicted values if uncertainty is taken into consideration; however, several threshold values considerably exceed this range. Adopting ecology-based nutrient targets should improve sustainable river management where nutrients are the major pressure preventing the achievement of good ecological status

Establishing nutrient thresholds in the face of uncertainty and multiple stressors: A comparison of approaches using simulated datasets

Various methods have been proposed to identify threshold concentrations of nutrients that would support good ecological status, but the performance of these methods and the influence of other stressors on the underlying models have not been fully evaluated. We used synthetic datasets to compare the performance of ordinary least squares, logistic and quantile regression, as well as, categorical methods based on the distribution of nutrient concentrations categorised by biological status. The synthetic datasets used differed in their levels of variation between explanatory and response variables, and were centered at different positions along the stressor (nutrient) gradient. In order to evaluate the performance of methods in “multiple stressor” situations, another set of datasets with two stressors was used. Ordinary least squares and logistic regression methods were the most reliable when predicting the threshold concentration when nutrients were the sole stressor; however, both had a tendency to underestimate the threshold when a second stressor was present. In contrast, threshold concentrations produced by categorical methods were strongly influenced by the level of the stressor (nutrient enrichment, in this case) relative to the threshold they were trying to predict (good/moderate in this instance). Although all the methods tested had limitations in the presence of a second stressor, upper quantiles seemed generally appropriate to establish non-precautionary thresholds. For example, upper quantiles may be appropriate when establishing targets for restoration, but not when seeking to minimise deterioration. Selection of an appropriate threshold concentration should also attend to the regulatory regime (i.e. policy requirements and environmental management context) within which it will be used, and the ease of communicating the principles to managers and stakeholders

Fish in lake ecological assessment in Europe: Quo Vadis?

It is well established that fish are sensitive indicators of environmental degradation and offer the major advantage of integrating the direct and indirect effects of stress over large scales of space and time. Nevertheless, the use of fish communities as indicators of environmental quality is highly challenging, therefore fish community has been one of the most neglected aspect of lake ecological monitoring. This paper gives an overview on fish-based assessment methods in Europe. By now, 15 Member States have finalised fish-based lake assessment systems, five of these assessment systems have been recently intercalibrated in the Alpine and Northern region, while Intercalibration is still ongoing in the Central-Baltic region. In contrary, several countries of the Mediterranean region have currently renounced the use of fish in lake assessment (mainly due to a low species richness, dominance of invasive taxa, and high costs of sampling), this opinion being strongly debated within region. This paper seeks to answer questions: How lake fish ecological assessment systems are built and used across Europe? Which pressures are assessed and are the pressure-response relationships tested? What are the main lessons and challenges of the lake fish methods` development and harmonization process

A new broad typology for rivers and lakes in Europe: Development and application for large-scale environmental assessments

European countries have defined >1000 national river types and >400 national lake types to implement the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD). In addition, common river and lake types have been defined within regions of Europe for intercalibrating the national classification systems for ecological status of water bodies. However, only a low proportion of national types correspond to these common intercalibration types. This causes uncertainty concerning whether the classification of ecological status is consistent across countries. Therefore, through an extensive dialogue with and data provision from all EU countries, we have developed a generic typology for European rivers and lakes. This new broad typology reflects the natural variability in the most commonly used environmental type descriptors: altitude, size and geology, as well as mean depth for lakes. These broad types capture 60–70% of all national WFD types including almost 80% of all European river and lake water bodies in almost all EU countries and can also be linked to all the common intercalibration types. The typology provides a new framework for large-scale assessments across country borders, as demonstrated with an assessment of ecological status and pressures based on European data from the 2nd set of river basin management plans. The typology can also be used for a variety of other large-scale assessments, such as reviewing and linking the water body types to habitat types under the Habitats Directive and the European Nature Information System (EUNIS), as well as comparing type-specific limit values for nutrients and other supporting quality elements across countries. Thus, the broad typology can build the basis for all scientific outputs of managerial relevance related to water body types