Action Responsible

Objectives

Action 2 is essential for one of the main objectives of the project: the elaboration and harmonization of assessment methodologies for the selected environmental quality parameters at EU level. This is most important for comparability of data gained at hundreds of long term ecosystem research and monitoring (LTER) sites across Europe. To tackle this issue Action 2 focuses on the elaboration of a conceptual framework for ecosystem monitoring, the collection of indicators and parameters targeting at structures and processes within ecosystems and the final selection of a core set of ecological parameters to be sampled. It aims at producing manuals providing a comprehensive collation of parameters and methods for terrestrial, freshwater and marine sites.

Activities and Results

The main activities were based on specialist group work, questionnaires about data gathered at long term ecosystem research and monitoring sites, development of a database related to ecological integrity indicators, compilation of a manual based on this database and presentation of EnvEurope outcomes at scientific conferences.

The outputs can be summarized as follow:

1. enlarging the expert base by addressing external colleagues
2. a comprehensive proposal for indicators targeting at focal qualities of ecosystems related to structures and processes (e.g. energy, water, matter fluxes) based on the conceptual framework of Ecological Integrity (see “Conceptual framework for indicator assignment and selection of LTER-sites”).
3. a review and selection of abiotic and biotic indicators, by identifying existing and new indicators for trans-domain and within eco-domain (marine, freshwater, terrestrial) comparison.
4. a review and selection of methods internationally established and applied for new parameters and parameters already measured at LTER sites.
5. Compilation of 3. and 4. in a user-friendly manual (see “Manual of harmonized methods for environmental indicators across different ecosystems”)

Integration of Ecological Integrity including ecosystem services in the DPSIR scheme

Future planning

The next steps to be taken are:

• Completion of the manual (references, missing indicators). This is open for contributions from the international ecosystem research and monitoring community.
• Scoring of indicators according to their relevance in terms of feasibility, ecological importance, cost-effectiveness etc. Again, this is not restricted to the EnvEurope community.
• Implementation of the feedback from the field testing of selected parameters.

Call for contributions

As the products of A2 are intended to be used by the international ecosystem research and monitoring community, we encourage people to give feedback and contribute some bits of their expertise to the manual (see Excel table and “Manual of harmonized methods for environmental indicators across different ecosystems”) and the scoring of parameters as well.