BIOASSESSMENT OF RUNNING WATERS: AQEM, STAR AND THE EUROPEAN UNION WATER FRAMEWORK DIRECTIVE.

L. Sandin. Department of Environmental Assessment, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, SE- 750 07 Uppsala, Sweden

The European Union Water Framework Directive (WFD) stipulates that the ecological quality of all freshwater bodies in the member states should be assessed using fish, macrophytes, benthic macrofauna, and periphyton. Two EU-funded projects connected to the WFD are: AQEM (The Development and Testing of an Integrated Assessment System for the Ecological Quality of Streams and Rivers throughout Europe using Benthic Macroinvertebrates) and STAR (Standardisation of river classifications: Framework method for calibrating different biological survey results against ecological quality classifications to be developed for the Water Framework Directive). The AQEM project concentrated on three different anthropogenic pressures: organic pollution, degradation in stream morphology, and acidification. An integrated PC-based assessment system using benthic macroinvertebrate multimetric indices was developed using samples (n = 999) collected from stream types distributed in eight countries across Europe (from Sweden in the north to Portugal, Italy and Greece in the south). In STAR, sampling methods and taxonomic identification of the four organism groups (see above) will be intercalibrated between 11 European countries. The results from the AQEM project and the work plan for the STAR project will be presented.