Report: Hytoplankton: Creation of multifactorial evaluation system — WFD — 1. Interim Report (2006)»

“The European Water Framework Directive, published in 2000, aims to establish a framework for the protection of inland surface waters, transitional waters, coastal waters and groundwater. The aim is to avoid further deterioration as well as the protection and improvement of the state of all aquatic ecosystems. To this end, specific measures are to be implemented for the gradual reduction of discharges and for remediation. By 2015 at the latest, the so-called “good” status must be achieved for most waters. For coastal and transitional waters, in addition to macrophytes and macrozoobenthos (in addition to fish fauna for transitional waters), the assessment of the phytoplankton in the Directive is also required. For this purpose, the species composition, abundance and biomass must be recorded. A major problem with many parameters required by the EC EC Directive is the determination of the reference state, i.e. the natural background values present before anthorpogenic influencing ecosystems. This situation should correspond to the “very good” condition. In most cases, however, there is not enough historical data to directly define this state. The phytoplankton-based assessment systems are handled differently in different EU Member States. This also has to do with the scope and quality of the available data. For Germany, all available data for the Baltic Sea coast waters have been statistically evaluated in a project funded by the BMBF (ELBO — Development of mission-oriented assessment bases for internal coastal waters of the German Baltic Sea coast according to EC-WRRL) and based on this a proposal for quality assessment based on phytoplankton measures has been compiled. Until now, however, this assessment system refers only 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 has been no system in Germany to classify the types of water defined for the EC-WRRL using the phytoplankton populations. The aim of this contract work was therefore to collect, harmonise, statistically analyse all available phytoplakton data and the associated environmental parameters for the German North Sea coastal waters and to draw up a proposal for a corresponding multifactorial assessment system. This interim report [...] provides an initial overview of the work carried out so far and the data available at present. [...] Based on this version, the following interim reports and the final report will be produced. [...]»