Report: Phytoplankton: Creation of multifactorial assessment systems – WFD – final report (2006)»
Description
“The European Water Framework Directive, published in 2000, aims to establish a regulatory framework for the protection of inland surface waters, transitional waters, coastal waters and groundwater.
The aim is to prevent further deterioration and to protect and improve the condition of all aquatic ecosystems. To this end, specific measures to gradually reduce discharges and to remediate will be implemented. By 2015 at the latest, the so-called “good” status must be achieved for most waters.
For coastal and transitional waters, the assessment of the phytoplankton in the Directive is required as a quality feature for the ecological status in addition to macrophytes and macrozoobenthos (in the case of transitional waters in addition to fish fauna). For this purpose, the species composition, abundance and biomass must be recorded.
A major problem for many of the parameters required by the EC WRD is the determination of the reference state, i.e. the natural background values that existed before an anthorpogenic influence on ecosystems. This situation should correspond to the “very good” condition. In most cases, however, there is not enough historical data to define this state directly.
Assessment systems based on phytoplankton are handled differently in the different EU Member States. This has to do with the volume and quality of the available data. For Germany, all available data for the Baltic Sea coastal waters have so far been statistically evaluated in a project funded by the BMBF (ELBO – Development of guideline assessment bases for internal coastal waters of the German Baltic Sea coast according to EC-WRRL) and based on this a proposal for the quality assessment using phytoplankton measurements has been prepared. However, this evaluation system so far only refers to a narrow salinity range, as sufficient consistent data sets were not available for a statistical evaluation of the total salinity range on the German Baltic Sea coast. For the North Sea, there was no system in Germany to classify the water types defined for the EC-WRRL using the phytoplankton populations.
The aim of this contract work was therefore to collect, standardise, statistically analyse all available phytoplakton data and the associated environmental parameters for the German North Sea coastal waters and to prepare a proposal for a corresponding multifactorial assessment system.”
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Tags
- charakterisierung-wrrl-wasserrahmenrichtlinie-phytoplankton-nlwkn-referenzbedingungen-übergangsgewässer-küstengewässer-qualitätskomponenten