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The reasons for reporting low confidence may be related to gaps in assessment systems for certain quality elements or certain types of water bodies, or lack of monitoring data.

At the EU level, only 39% of the classified river and lake water bodies and 44% of the classified transitional and coastal water bodies are reported to be classified with medium or high confidence. This suggests that the classification results are quite uncertain for the majority of water bodies in these first RBMPs.  In many cases the classification is probably based merely on expert judgement and/or on results of the pressure and impact analyses (article 5) rather than on biological monitoring data and WFD-compliant classification systems.