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Note: Numbers in brackets indicate the number of monitoring stations available for trend analysis. Decreasing groundwater level trends (orange) range between -0.01 metres and more than -2 metres per year. Increasing groundwater levels trends (blue) range between +0.01 metres per year and more than +2 metres per year. UN M49 standard is used for grouping the countries where data is available for the indicator assessment: Eastern Europe - Bulgaria, Poland, Slovakia; Northern Europe: Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, Lithuania, Latvia, Sweden; Southern Europe: Cyprus, Greece, Italy, North Macedonia, Slovenia; Western Europe: Austria, Belgium, France, Netherlands, Switzerland.
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Previous comments
The phrase "increasing trend in Eastern Europe" is misleading, because only Poland is increasing, it is not the case for any other country, even in Eatern Europe. Therefore the graph with the regions is also misleading.
Additionally, the trend is so much positive in Poland, as compared to all other countries, that it could be interesting to study deeper the reasons before communicating on the indicator.
As concerns "Southern Europe", it might be also misleading since Spain and Portugal are missing. Therefore EEA could, either suppress Fig.1a, or at least add strict comments and caution for the reader.
Thank you for your comments.
During the Eionet consultation we discovered that the monitoring data series from Poland were entered in the database in another unit (meter below surface – as depth) than what is described in the WISE data dictionary (meter with respect to sea level). As a result, Poland was removed from the indicator assessment. The resulting countries in Eastern Europe (Bulgaria and Slovakia) show on average a decreasing groundwater level trend.
Because of the limited number of countries in most of the regions, the regional aggregation of groundwater level trends is removed form Figure 1a, as was suggested by the reviewer. We present the groundwater level trend at the aggregation level of countries, while grouping the countries in the four regions in the bar-plot (new Figure 1b).
Comment from AT:
What does the range mean? what means “… more than -2 meters”?: either use only “…more than + or -0.01 metres per year” or indicate the maximum of groundwater level trends to give the range. Otherwise the message of range and "…more than 2 metres” means nothing.
It should be clarified whether the monitoring stations are representative.
Thank you for your comments. We agree that this classification is too vague and it is improved. However, with the purpose of conveying a clear message to policy makers we maintain the representation in three classes in the figures instead of a more detailed classification.
In the section with supportin information, the classes are described as:
Also, additional information on the distribution over these classes is provided in the note section of Figure 1a and 1b:
“It can be observed that 11% of the monitoring stations show a downward trend (less than 0.1 m/y decrease: 4%; between 0.1 and 1 m/y decrease: 6%; decrease of more than 1 m/y: less than 1%), 6% of the monitoring stations show an upward trend (less than 0.1 m/y increase: 2%, between 0.1 and 1 m/y increase: 3%; decrease of more than 1 m/y: less than 1%) and 83% of the monitoring stations show no significant trend.”
The representativity of the monitoring stations could not be verified, because no inofrmation about this is available in the WISE database. For those countries that submitted a large amount of data that cover a large part of the country, the spatial representativity of the dataset will be better probably better than for the countries that submitted a small amount of data or data that cover only part of the country. We improved the assessment section of draft indicator by the following:
POLAND
Comments:
It should be recalculated - as explained above.
The title is wrong as it suggests data availability for the whole period 2000-2019, while data availability for various countries in not uniform:
Country_Code
Since Year
AT
2008
BE
2009
BG
2010
CH
2010
CY
2000
DK
2003
EE
2011
EL
2004
FR
2013
IE
2015
IT
2014
LT
2008
LV
2015
MK
2011
NL
2011
PL
2013
SE
2009
SI
2013
SK
2007
Thank you for your comment
The required units of the data are described in the WISE data dictionary. For groundwater levels this is groundwater heads (m) with respect to sea level. During revision, the data from the Polish monitoring stations were removed from indicator assessment and the indicator sheet. When the data for these monitoring station are uploaded again in the unit described by the WISE data dictionary, they can be taken up in the assessment of the groundwater level trends again.
The suggestion to provide information about the data period per countries was adopted in the indicator sheet. We added the time period of data availability for each country in the note section of the new figure 1a and 1b: “Eastern Europe: Bulgaria (2010-2019), Slovakia (2007-2019); Northern Europe: Denmark (2000-2019), Estonia (2011-2019), Ireland (2000-2019), Lithuania (2008-2019), Latvia (2006-2019), Sweden (2009-2019); Southern Europe: Cyprus (2000-2018), Italy (2013-2019), North Macedonia (2011-2019), Slovenia (2006-2019); Western Europe: Austria (2008-2018), Belgium (2005-2019), France (2013-2018), Netherlands (2011-2019), Switzerland (2002-2019). Years between brackets behind the country names indicate the earliest and latest year for which data was reported.”
In addition, a detailed overview in tabular format of the length and number of monitoring stations is provided in the “supporting information” (methodlogy section).