Introduction

The European Environment Agency (EEA) manages water data and information reported either voluntarily by EEA member countries (water quality in groundwater, rivers, lakes; emissions of pollutants and water quantity); and data reported via REPORTNET under EU water directives: Water Framework Directive (WFD); Bathing Water Directives (BWD) and Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive (UWWTD), Nitrate Directive (NiD) and Drinking water Directive (DWD).  Reported data are processed at EEA and stored in water data center. They can be also accessible on EEA home page. Data reported under Nitrate Directive (NiD) and Drinking water Directive (DWD) are not yet available at EEA water data center home page.  

The aim of the country fiches is both to clean-up and correcting errors in the data member countries now have reported for 15-20 years.  Some errors have been introduced by the EEA and its Topic Centres handling of the reported data; others is due to errors introduced in member countries reporting.

Another aspect is to improve the spatial and temporal coverage and to ensure that the relevant determinands are reported.

• In some cases member countries will be asked for more stations to increase the spatial coverage or density of stations; or questions on why data have not been reported from some of the RBDs.
• EEA water quality indicators are for trend assessments based on consistent time series with some gap filling. For a single country consistent time series are established for the defined period (e.g. 1992-2012; or 2000-2012) with some gap filling(e.g. up to 3 years)  and only stations with values for all years in the defined period are used. This ensures that any trend is because of change in the observations and not in the stations included.
• In the current data set the reporting of some high priority determinands has stopped or there has been change in the determinands in the database e.g.  cadmium changed to dissolved cadmium. EEA wants to clarify if these changes are real changes or it has been errors/misinterpretations introduced in compiling the databases. In addition, the aim is to ensure that the high priority determinands (e.g. nitrate or orthophosphate)  have as complete coverage as possible.

The last part is on ensuring linkage between the different Waterbases by having a common coding system (Water Body ID) and linked to different reference layers such as the RBDcodes.