Assessing the ecological status in the context of the European Water Framework Directive: where should we go now?

After more than a decade of implementation by water managers in all river basins across Europe, the Water Framework Directive (WFD) has now reached a maturity age. However, some significant gaps still remain in the way WFD is implemented, and there is now a need for water managers and scientist to communicate better in order to find scientific solutions to these gaps. To do so, a Science-Policy Interface (SPI) activity was launched in 2010 led by Directorate General (DG) Research and Onema (the French national agency for water and aquatic ecosystems), providing an interactive forum to connect scientists and WFD end-users. One major aim of the SPI activity was to establish a list of most crucial research and development needs for enhancing WFD implementation. The purpose of the present study is to make the synthesis of the proposals made regarding ecological status, for which 10 priority issues were raised. For lakes, temporary streams as well as transitional and coastal waters, WFD implementation still strongly suffer from the lack of WFD-compliant bioassessment methods. For rivers, special attention should now be paid to the ecological impacts of hydromorphological alterations on biological communities, notably those affecting river continuity and riparian covering. Spatial extrapolation tools are needed in order to evaluate ecological status for water bodies not directly surveyed. The need for more functional bioassessment tools as complements to usual WFD-compliant tools, and to clearly connect good ecological state, biodiversity and ecosystem services when implementing WFD have also been identified as crucial issues.JRC.H.1-Water Resource