A practical approach to improve the statistical performance of surface water monitoring networks.

The representativeness of aquatic ecosystem monitoring and the precision of the assessment results are of high importance when implementing the EU's Water Framework Directive that aims to secure a good status of waterbodies in Europe. However, adapting monitoring designs to answer the objectives and allocating the sampling resources effectively are seldom practiced. Here, we present a practical solution how the sampling effort could be re-allocated without decreasing the precision and confidence of status class assignment.

Lakes in the Finnish Eurowaternet: status and trends.

The Eurowaternet is a monitoring network designed to cover all European countries, with the overall objective of obtaining timely, quantitative and comparative information on the status of inland waters so that their key environmental problems can be defined, quantified and monitored. Finland launched the Eurowaternet for lakes in 2000. The network was set up according to guidelines of the European Environment Agency (EEA) and was based on national, regional and local monitoring programmes.