Three hundred ways to assess Europe's surface waters: An almost complete overview of biological methods to implement the Water Framework Directive

By S. Birk, W. Bonne, Á. Borja, S. Brucet, A. Courrat, S. Poikane, A. Solimini, W. Bund, N. Zampoukas, D. Hering. 2012

993 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract According to the Water Framework Directive (WFD), the status of European surface waters is assessed using aquatic organism groups. Here we present an overview of 297 assessment methods, based on a questionnaire survey addressing authorities in all countries implementing the WFD. Twenty-eight countries reported on methods applied to rivers (30%), coastal waters (26%), lakes (25%) and transitional waters (19%). More than half of the methods are based on macroscopic plants (28%) or benthic invertebrates (26%); in addition, phytoplankton (21%), fish (15%) and phytobenthos (10%) were assessed. Countries of Central and Western Europe had developed almost all methods required for the WFD implementation. Two main sampling strategies were discernable: small-scale sampling of the taxonomically diverse groups of benthic invertebrates and phytobenthos that demand elaborate processing, versus large-scale sampling of vast, species-poor plant stands or the mobile fish fauna. About three-quarters of methods identified organisms to species-level while in particular phytoplankton-based methods used class- or phylum-level, or included no taxonomic information. Out of nine metric types distinguished, river methods used more sensitivity and trait metrics while for other water categories abundance metrics prevailed. Fish-based methods showed the highest number of metrics. Fifty-six percent of methods focussed on the detection of eutrophication and organic pollution, with shares decreasing from autotrophic to heterotrophic organism groups: phytoplankton > phytobenthos > macroscopic plants > benthic invertebrates > fish fauna. The order was almost reverse for hydrological or morphological deterioration: fish fauna and macroscopic plants > benthic invertebrates > phytoplankton > phytobenthos. These pressures were mainly assessed by methods applied to rivers and transitional waters. The pressure-impact relationship of about one-third of methods was not tested empirically with methods for transitional waters being the least validated. The strength of relationships differed significantly between organism groups and water categories. The correlation coefficients generally covered a broad range ( 0.8), but on average with the pattern: phytoplankton > macroscopic plants > benthic invertebrates > phytobenthos and fish fauna. In terms of water categories the following order resulted: coastal waters > lakes > transitional waters > rivers. Status boundaries were mostly defined using statistical approaches. We advocate better reflection of the necessary sampling effort and precision, full validations of pressure-impact relationships and an implementation of more ecological components into classification.

Subfields: Ecology, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f19ce4aa71692276aa76de558e5814452010685c

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Citations in the corpus

Tales from a thousand and one ways to integrate marine ecosystem components when assessing the environmental status (2014, methodology): “…(92/43/EEC) and other international initiatives have produced numerous methodologies that can be applied to different ecosystem components, such as various taxonomic or functional groups, habitats, traits, physical features, or to the whole ecosystem (Birk et al., 2012; Halpern et al., 2012).”
Freshwater biomonitoring in the Information Age (2017, background): “However, in practice, using all BQEs for a sampled site is seldom or only partly achieved because of both financial and logistical constraints (Birk et al. 2012).”
A Catalogue of Marine Biodiversity Indicators (2016, methodology): “…last couple of decades we have witnessed a boom of ecological indicators worldwide (see reviews by e.g., Marques et al., 2009; Cardoso et al., 2010; Birk et al., 2012; Borja et al., 2016a), driven either by environmental policies or research, attempting to cover, for example, the most sensitive…”
Taxonomic and geographical representation of freshwater environmental DNA research in aquatic conservation (2019, methodology): “Most of the monitoring approaches apply classical field‐based techniques (Geist, 2015; Hering, Moog, Sandin, & Verdonschot, 2004; reviewed by Birk et al., 2012).”
Assessing strengths and weaknesses of DNA metabarcoding‐based macroinvertebrate identification for routine stream monitoring (2017, background): “The abundance and diversity of macroinvertebrates are used as key biological quality indicators in national and international aquatic biomonitoring programmes, which employ a variety of bioassessment protocols (Birk et al. 2012).”
Metabarcoding of lake benthic diatoms: from structure assemblages to ecological assessment (2018, background): “…de Savoie Mont Blanc, 75 Av. de Corzent, 74200 Thonon les bains Cedex, France D. Ariztegui Section of Earth & Environmental Sciences, University of Geneva, Rue des Maraı̂chers 13, 1205 Geneva, Switzerland concerning their preservation and management (Birk et al., 2012; Jacquet et al., 2014).”
Ecological uniqueness of stream and lake diatom communities shows different macroecological patterns (2017, background): “Besides their value for ecosystem functioning and structure, diatoms are often used as indicator taxa for the purposes of bioassessment and monitoring (Birk et al., 2012; Heino, 2015), and thus, more information on their ecological uniqueness is needed.”
Effective monitoring of freshwater fish (2019, background): “In mandated monitoring programmes, the data might be compared against predetermined standards (Alexander, 2008; Hellawell, 1991; Hurford, 2010), such as in the Water Framework Directive of the European Union (Birk et al., 2012).”
Plants in aquatic ecosystems: current trends and future directions (2017, background): “(Birk et al., 2012).”