Report on Harmonisation of freshwater biological methods

States and candidate countries. Information from ECOSTAT WG 2A members clearlyindicates that Member States and candidate countries are working on the developmentof WFD compatible biological methods.10. To establish the register of sites for the intercalibration exercise, Member Statesand Candidate Countries were asked to fill in a metadata questionnaire along with thesites submitted for the exercise. The returned answers give important information interms of compliance with the ecological assessment requirements of the WFD andcomparability of the national methods.11. In our evaluation, we have used data stored in the intercalibration metadata baseof January 2004 1 . At this date, the database contained the data used for assessment ofthe ecological quality of 314 lakes submitted by 21 countries. However, the lakeswere mostly assessed making use of physico-chemical paremeters (all countries, formost lakes) and phytoplankton (18 countries), followed by benthic invertebrates andMacrophytes (Fig. 1).B. River12. The overview of the river phytoplankton and phytobenthos monitoring systemsincludes the approaches of 18 countries: 4 methods for phytoplankton and 15 forphytobenthos. Only 4 countries (Estonia, Latvia, Romania and Hungary) usephytoplankton in their monitoring programs, and in one of these, Latvia, it is stillunder development. For phytobenthos, only a few countries have current monitoringprogrammes, i.e. Austria, France, Slovenia and Romania.1At the time the Harmonisation Task started and until the end of 2004 the metadata of the final registerwas not available. This contains information for one more country and more lakes than the previousdraft register. However, we considered that for the purpose of comparison of methods these are not soimportant changes and have decided to use the metadata of the intercalibration register as of January2004.7