An official website of the European Union How do you know?      
European Commission logo
JRC Publications Repository Menu

A phytoplankton trophic index to assess the status of lakes for the Water Framework Directive

cover
Despite improvements in waste water treatment systems, the impact of anthropogenic nutrient sources remains a key issue for the management of European lakes. The Water Framework Directive provides a mechanism through which progress can be made on this issue. The Directive requires a classification of the ecological status of phytoplankton which includes an assessment of taxonomic composition. In this paper we present a composition metric, the Plankton Trophic Index, that was developed in the WISER EU FP7 project and demonstrate how it has been used to compare national phytoplankton classification systems in Northern and Central Europe. The metric was deerived from sumaer phytoplankton data from 1795 lakes, summarised by genus covering 20 European countries. We show that it is significantly related to total phosphorus concentrations, but that it is alos sensitive to alkalinity, lake size and climatic variables. Through the use of country specific reference values for the index we demonstrate that it is significantly related to othrt national phytoplankton assessment systems and illustrate for a sinngle lake type how it was used to intercalibrate Water Framework Directive boundaries for different countries.
2012-12-20
SPRINGER
JRC73811
0018-8158,   
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10750-012-1390-8,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC73811,   
10.1007/s10750-012-1390-8,   
Language Citation
NameCountryCityType
Datasets
IDTitlePublic URL
Dataset collections
IDAcronymTitlePublic URL
Scripts / source codes
DescriptionPublic URL
Additional supporting files
File nameDescriptionFile type 
Show metadata record  Copy citation url to clipboard  Download BibTeX
Items published in the JRC Publications Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated. Additional information: https://ec.europa.eu/info/legal-notice_en#copyright-notice