Training of the Ecological Status Classification System for the Assessment of Surface Water Bodies

1.    INTRODUCTION

The development of ecological assessment and classification systems is one of the most important and technically challenging parts of the implementation of the Water Framework Directive.

The Water Framework Directive (WFD) asks us to classify waters in a different way, using new and revised environmental standards to assess whether environmental conditions are good enough to support biology. According to the Ecological Status Classification Guidance from the EU, we have to use both Biological, Physico-Chemical and Hydromorphological elements in order to calculate the Ecological Status.

An assessment of the biological quality elements must be taken into account when assigning waterbodies to any of the ecological status or ecological potential classes. The status of each of the biological elements for natural waterbodies is determined by measuring the extent of the deviation, if any, of the observed condition from the reference condition established for that waterbody. Reference conditions are the conditions established for the biological elements in the absence of pollution or disturbance.

In order to get biological results in each waterbodies, some parameters related with biological elements should be selected and sampled. This suggested training will try to achieve the standard sampling guidelines for each river basin pilot in order the beneficiaries will have the same common procedures. This training is mainly oriented for calculate the ESCS using macroinvertebrates but also the other elements recommended by the WFD are going to be fully trained.

The purpose of this training is to provide general guidance on the assessment of ecological status leading to the overall ecological classification of water bodies for the purposes of the EC-Water Framework Directive. The document that will be used as base in the training process also provides specific guidance for each basin on the role of the general physico-chemical quality elements and hydromorphology in ecological classification.

The ESCS exercise is a learning process that will continue according to the next steps in all the pilot basins with the objective of doing some intercalibration process in the near future.