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Preserving the good 'health' of an aquatic ecosystem requires the water quality to be analysed. Water analyses are necessary to establish the pollution baseline and then to continually monitor pollutant concentrations. Classical water analysis methods are time-consuming, suffer from interferences, and are costly. Therefore, new analytical techniques that are faster, more accurate, and cheaper than classical techniques should clearly be incorporated into long-term studies as they become available. To allow this, a new technique must be validated against 'official methods' or a previously validated technique. One of the most important validation parameter is the comparability of the data produced using the new and established techniques. Both techniques must give equivalent but not necessarily identical results. In the study presented here we validated an ion chromatography method against a previously validated flow injection analysis method paying particular attention to the comparability of the data produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]