WISER final conference
25-26 January 2012 Tallinn, Estonia
Current Questions In Water Management
How do we assess the impact of lakeshore degradation?
Which organisms are suited to assess the impact of different stressors on coastal areas across Europe?
What are the best restoration and management options to mitigate human impact on rivers and their estuaries?
Such questions frequently arise in the daily business of river basin and water managers throughout Europe. The answers are not trivial and have been subject to the large-scale integrated project WISER.
WISER has addressed these questions. WISER means 'Water bodies in Europe: Integrative Systems to assess ecological status and Recovery'. For three years, 25 European research institutions representing 16 countries have addressed the assessment and management of rivers, lakes, transitional and coastal waters in Europe.
In particular, WISER has:
- elaborated WFD-compliant assessment systems for lakes, transitional and coastal waters, which supported the European Intercalibration Exercise,
- estimated the sources and levels of uncertainty connected to the assessment methods
- analysed restoration and rehabilitation studies and identified suitable measures to improve surface waters at the large scale and
- highlighted the role of global and climate change in aquatic ecosystem monitoring and management.
WISER final conference
The conference was aiming to provide a platform to present the applicability of the developed tools and approaches. The focus was on a science-policy interface with specific sessions for in-depth scientific presentations and hands-on sessions for end users. The overall programme was started with the WISER Final Project Meeting (Monday, Tuesday), followed by the Final Conference (Wednesday, Thursday), where the whole WISER story was told from the beginning (the Water Framework Directive and the Intercalibration Exercise) until the future (European surface water assessment and management in light of global and climate change).
The conference has summarised the project outcome and has targeted both scientists and practitioners in river basin and water management. In 16 presentations, project partners and invited keynote speakers have shown new bioassessment methods and management schemes to achieve the goal of the Water Framework Directive. Invited experts have provided insight into experiences from other regions outside Europe and have addressed more recent but largely neglected topics in aquatic ecosystem evaluation, such as ecosystem functions and services. Two poster sessions have added more specific results and provided room for discussions with WISER experts.
Download conference flyer (1.5 mb, pdf)
The final conference was supported by
