To support CEN in its development of appropriate standard methods for the WFD. The Workpackages described above will enable CEN to absorb the outputs into their work proposals as committee drafts which will obviate the need for much of the pre-normative and co-normative work. To prepare information appropriate to the setting of a European CEN standard, including: the methods best suited for particular geographic regions or stress types the most effective form of data and metrics for the determination of Ecological Status (e.g. indicator taxa, qualitative or quantitative community composition, trophic structure, species trait data etc.) and the delineation and definition of the five grades of Ecological Status with special emphasise on reference conditions.
The information derived from the previous Workpackages, especially Workpackages 6, 9, 11 and 12 will be used in order to propose appropriate approaches for consideration for establishing a draft CEN standards on integrated biological river assessments. Since all assessment methods, which need to be standardised for the WFD implementation, are based on stream type specific reference conditions, a data source on reference communities for European stream types must be part of a future standard. All respective data derived from this project will be processed correspondingly to describe composition and variability of reference communities for the various taxonomic groups.
Data derived from other sources and close links and co-operation with other European projects will provide valuable complementary information. The role of the applied partners in the consortium and established links with government agencies in other Member States will also be important in developing proposals.
For the success of this Workpackage, the participation of an international standardisation group is particularly crucial. For the purposes of this proposal the timetable is given as months 19-36, but CEN standardisation work will continue with the development of these standards for a further 18 months. Close collaboration with all relevant groups is anticipated both through the chairmanship of the relevant CEN groups and its task groups as well as by national links with the participating standard bodies.
Two CEN Workshops will be hold at the end of the contracted period. They are to inform CEN/National Standards representatives about progress with the research project and to receive feedback from them in order to avoid any major obstacles during the preparation of the standard method(s) which will be in preparation after the project ends. The first will be science-based and be oriented towards the practicalities of the method, the second will be about the more precise requirements (quality assurance, applicability to all ecoregions, time, repeatability, reproducibility, robustness etc) of the standard(s) produced. There will be about 25 participants at each. Both will involve the essential players of the project and the representatives of the standards bodies on the relevant CEN Working Groups. Both workshops will result in the formulation of drafts for circulation, amendment, agreement by participating countries in CEN.
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