The State Environmental Monitoring - Monitoring of the Baltic Sea

The spatial dataset concerns the monitoring of the Baltic marine environment, which is carried out as part of the water quality monitoring subsystem of the State Environmental Monitoring coordinated by the Chief Inspector of Environmental Protection. The purpose of the research is to create the basis for undertaking actions to improve the condition of the Baltic Sea ecosystem and its protection against pollution. The obligation to monitor and assess the quality of the Baltic marine environment results from Poland's reporting obligations set out in the Convention on the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Baltic Sea Area. According to the definition of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive, marine waters for which Member States develop marine strategies (including its assessment, monitoring programs and its periodic review, and if necessary updating) include “waters, the seabed and parent rock situated on the seaward side of the baseline from which the extent of the territorial sea is measured up to and including the furthest reaches of the territorial waters (the extent of the exclusive economic zone boundary) on which the Member State has or executes jurisdictional rights”. Simultaneously, the assessment of the quality of Baltic Sea waters as the reservoir receiving pollutants discharged from its sub-basin district is used to manage and evaluate the effectiveness of the measures to protect water resources. Research on the state of the marine environment of the Polish Baltic zone conducted at the country level is a Polish contribution to the international „Coordinated Baltic Sea Monitoring Programme – COMBINE”. It's include deep-sea zone (measurement stations in the area of the Gotland Basin, the Bornholm Deep and the Gdansk Deep) and the programme consisting in the monitoring of the coastal zone, bays and lagoons (the Gdansk Bay, the Pomerania Bay, Vistula and Szczecin Lagoons at the sites excluded from monitoring within the framework of the task monitoring and assessment of transitional and coastal waters) and supplementing the programme implemented under the subsystem monitoring of surface water quality. As part of the program, physical and chemical conditions are measured, i.e. temperature, salinity, oxygen concentration, visibility of the Secchi disc, the contents of nutrients, heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants. Observations are also carried out on biological elements of the marine environment, i.e.: phytoplankton, zooplankton, macrophytobenthos, macrozoobenthos ichthyofauna and the level of harmfull substances in water and marine organisms, radionuclide contents in water and sediments, litter in the marine environment and on the beach, and underwater noise of anthropogenic origin. Based on the obtained data, annual assessments of the Baltic's environment are issued.