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The aim of European water policy is to achieve good ecological status in all rivers, lakes, coastal and transitional waters by 2027. Currently, more than half of water bodies are in a degraded condition and nutrient enrichment is one of the main culprits. Therefore, there is a pressing need to establish reliable and comparable nutrient criteria that are consistent with good ecological status. This paper highlights the wide range of nutrient criteria currently in use by Member States of the European Union to support good ecological status and goes on to suggest that inappropriate criteria may be hindering the achievement of good status. Along with a comprehensive overview of nutrient criteria, we provide a critical analysis of the threshold concentrations and approaches by which these are set. We identify four essential issues: (1) Different nutrients (nitrogen and/or phosphorus) are used for different water categories in different countries. (2) The use of different nutrient fractions (total, dissolved inorganic) and statistical summary metrics (e.g., mean, percentiles, seasonal, annual) currently hampers comparability between countries, particularly for rivers, transitional and coastal waters. (3) Wide ranges in nutrient threshold values within shared water body types, in some cases showing more than a 10-fold difference in concentrations. (4) Different approaches used to set threshold nutrient concentrations to define the boundary between “good” and “moderate” ecological status. Expert judgement-based methods resulted in significantly higher (less stringent) good-moderate threshold values compared with data-driven approaches, highlighting the importance of consistent and rigorous approaches to criteria setting. We suggest that further development of nutrient criteria should be based on relationships between ecological status and nutrient concentrations, taking into account the need for comparability between different water categories, water body types within these

The Water Framework Directive is the first international legislation to require European countries to establish comparable ecological assessment schemes for their freshwaters. A key element in harmonising quality classification within and between Europe’s river basins is an “Intercalibration” exercise, stipulated by the WFD, to ensure that the good status boundaries in all of the biological assessment methods correspond to similar levels of anthropogenic pressure. In this article, we provide a comprehensive overview of this international comparison, focusing on the assessment schemes developed for freshwater lakes. Out of 82 lake ecological assessment methods reported for the comparison, 62 were successfully intercalibrated and included in the EC Decision on intercalibration, with a high proportion of phytoplankton (18), macrophyte (17) and benthic fauna (13) assessment methods. All the lake assessment methods are reviewed in this article, including the results of intercalibration. Furthermore, the current gaps and way forward to reach consistent management objectives for European lakes are discussed.

1. A safe, clean water supply is critical for sustaining many important ecosystem services provided by freshwaters. The development of cyanobacterial blooms in lakes and reservoirs has a major impact on the provision of these services, particularly limiting their use for recreation and water supply for drinking and spray irrigation. Nutrient enrichment is thought to be the most important pressure responsible for the widespread increase in cyanobacterial blooms in recent decades. Quantifying how nutrients limit cyanobacterial abundance in lakes is, therefore, a key need for setting robust targets for the management of freshwaters. 2. Using a dataset from over 800 European lakes, we highlight the use of quantile regression modelling for understanding the maximum potential capacity of cyanobacteria in relation to total phosphorus (TP) and the use of a range of quantile responses, alongside World Health Organisation (WHO) health alert thresholds for recreational waters, for setting robust phosphorus targets for lake management in relation to water use. 3. The analysis shows that cyanobacteria exhibit a non-linear response to phosphorus with the sharpest increase in cyanobacterial abundance occurring in the TP range from about 20 µg L-1 up to about 100 µg L-1. 4. The likelihood of exceeding the World Health Organisation (WHO) ‘low health alert’ threshold increases from about 5% exceedance at 16 µg L-1 to 40% exceedance at 54 µg L-1. About 50% of the studied lakes remain below this WHO health alert threshold, irrespective of high summer TP concentrations, highlighting the importance of other factors affecting cyanobacteria population growth and loss processes, such as high flushing rate. 5. Synthesis and applications. Developing a more quantitative understanding of the effect of nutrients on cyanobacterial abundance in freshwater lakes provides important knowledge for restoring and sustaining a safe, clean water supply for multiple uses. Our models can be used to set nutr

Lake phytoplankton are adopted world-wide as a sensitive indicator of water quality. European environmental legislation, the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD), formalises this, requiring the use of phytoplankton to assess the ecological status of lakes and coastal waters. Here we provide a rigorous assessment of a number of proposed phytoplankton metrics for assessing the ecological quality of European lakes, specifically in response to nutrient enrichment, or eutrophication, the most widespread pressure affecting lakes. To be useful indicators, metrics must have a small measurement error relative to the eutrophication signal we want them to represent among lakes of different nutrient status. An understanding of variability in metric scores among different locations around a lake, or due to sampling and analytical variability can also identify how best this measurement error is minimised. To quantify metric variability, we analyse data from a multi-scale field campaign of 32 European lakes, resolving the extent to which seven phytoplankton metrics (including chlorophyll a, the most widely used metric of lake quality) vary among lakes, among sampling locations within a lake and through sample replication and processing. We also relate these metrics to environmental variables, including total phosphorus concentration as an indicator of eutrophication. For all seven metrics, 65–96% of the variance in metric scores was among lakes, much higher than variability occurring due to sampling/sample processing. Using multi-model inference, there was strong support for relationships between among-lake variation in three metrics and differences in total phosphorus concentrations. Three of the metrics were also related to mean lake depth. Variability among locations within a lake was minimal (<4%), with sub-samples and analysts accounting for much of the within-lake metric variance. This indicates that a single sampling location is representative and suggests that sub-sample rep

Sampling, analysis and counting of phytoplankton has been undertaken in European lakes for more than 100 years (Apstein 1892, Lauterborn 1896, Lemmermann 1903, Woloszynska 1912, Nygaard 1949). Since this early period of pioneers, there has been progress in the methods used to sample, fix, store and analyse phytoplankton. The aim of the deliverable D3.1-4 is to select, harmonize and recommend the most optimal method as a basis for lake assessment. We do not report and review the huge number of European national methods or other published manuals for phytoplankton sampling and analysis that are available. An agreement on a proper sampling procedure is not trivial for lake phytoplankton. In the early 20th century, sampling was carried out using plankton nets. An unconcentrated sample without any pre-screening is required for quantitative phytoplankton analysis, for which various water samplers were developed. Sampling of distinct water depths or an integral sample of the euphotic zone affects the choice of the sampler and sampling procedure. The widely accepted method to quantify algal numbers together with species determination was developed by Utermöhl (1958), who proposed the counting technique using sediment chambers and inverse microscopy. This is the basis for the recently agreed CEN standard “Water quality - Guidance standard on the enumeration of phytoplankton using inverted microscopy (Utermöhl technique)” (CEN 15204, 2006). This CEN standard does not cover the sampling procedure or the calculation of biovolumes for phytoplankton species, although Rott (1981), Hillebrand et al (1999) and Pohlmann & Friedrich (2001) have contributed advice on how to calculate taxa biovolumes effectively. Willén (1976) suggested a simplified counting method, when counting 60 individuals of each species. For the Scandinavian region an agreed phytoplankton sampling and counting manual was compiled, which has been in use for about 20 years (Olrik et al. 1998, Blomqvist & Herlitz 19