Table of contents
3 - General comments and questions
If you have further comments or questions on e.g. methodology, data availability, further improvement of the indicator, please provide your recommendations, expectations and ideas.
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I received the following reply from my freshwater colleagues: Since the indicators have actually been known for years, we don't really understand the current need for comment. If the indicators are constantly changed, the comparability of the results suffers.
It should also be mentioned that earlier comments from us were generally not taken into account. It would be helpful for such a consultation to list first which changes were made (so that Eionet members don't have to read everything again or search for the changes). -
The indicator (and underlying data and assessment) Nutrients in freshwater 8EAP indicator should be identical to the Nitrate Directive indicators on this topic. Supporting a consistent set of policy conclusions for both 8EAP and ND and (the in WISE available ND) data is used more than once. For the countries perspective this coherence is very important as the policy implications and actions are triggered in the ND policy cycle and most likely not by the 8EAP. We leave the timing (8EAP or ND first) and its policy implications to the EEA experts.
With regarding to data availability -and in line with the previous point- the NL provides (also in the future) information on nutrients within the reporting schema according to the Nitrates Directive. That data is also reporting via WISE. For nitrate no data was used for the Netherlands. This data is regurlary available though.
Note: within the Nitrates Directive 50 mgNO3/L (11.3 mgNO3-N/L) is used based on winter averages.
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I would like to note that at least for the German groundwater data the EEA data are not suited to aggregate on the level of water bodies. For Germany, there are more groundwater bodies defined than there are sampling stations available in the EEA dataset - thus no valid conclusion can be drawn on the water body level. Instead, WFD related data (e.g. raw data for nutrients) on the chemical status of groundwater should be used, when aggregating on the level of water bodies. However, in this case EEA must adapt the SoE-reporting obligations specifying that (raw-)data from all those WFD sampling stations, upon which the chemical status for groundwater bodies is evaluated, are needed for SoE-reporting.
It might be interesting to explore deeper connections in the complex data set. For example, it might be worth to reveal the extent of correlation (i.e. Pearson, Kendall or Spearman) between each indicator parameter based on the whole data set, or certain segments of that. Displaying the overall similarity of the various countries and/or water bodies based on all measured parameters might be illustrative as well. For example, in certain years or periods characterised by the average values of some years, multivariate analysis (i.e. cluster analysis or ordination techniques) would reveal the differences among samples or sample groups.