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Programme

Scientist

WISER will develop tools for integrated status assessment with a focus on lakes, coastal and transitional waters and will evaluate recovery processes for rivers, lakes, coastal and transitional waters. WISER aims at developing assessment methods for organism groups (fish, invertebrates and aquatic flora) and ecosystem types (lakes, coastal and transitional waters) for which sufficient methods are still lacking.

WISER will further contribute to making existing assessment methods better comparable, i.e. to the intercalibration of assessment methods presently carried out by European countries. To support the development of recovery schemes WISER will model the effects of nutrient reduction and hydromorphological improvement on the ecological status of freshwater and coastal water ecosystems, taking the simultaneous effect of climate changeLong-term change of temperature and precipitation pattern caused by greenhouse gas emissions into account. A special focus will be on estimating uncertaintyMeasure of confidence to express the degree to which a result is subject to chance in bioassessment and in modelling ecosystem response to restorationActivity to improve the status of degraded waters, be it waste water treatment or structural improvements.

WISER will both evaluate existing data and will perform new field exercises. The development and intercalibration of assessment methods will mainly be based on existing data, using more than 90 databases which have been built in previous and ongoing projects. A wide variety of statistical and modelling techniques will be employed, linking biological data to the degree of degradationDeterioration or impairment of the quality of a water body as determined by environmental variables.

Individual assessment methods will be developed for

in lakes and in coastal/transitional waters.

The response of different organism groups to degradation will be compared. The estimation of uncertaintyMeasure of confidence to express the degree to which a result is subject to chance in bioassessment will be based on field investigations with parallel samples. Response to nutrient reduction and hydromorphological improvement will be modelled on large geographic scales and for case studies, e.g. catchments. There will be a close interaction with water managers, intercalibration groups and Environmental Agencies.


WISER: "Water bodies in Europe: Integrative Systems to assess Ecological status and Recovery"
Online: http://www.wiser.eu/programme/index.php [date: 2024/03/19]
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