The big challenge for the European water and environmental managers these years is to implement the Water Framework Directive. Based on the basic characterisation of water districts water authorities have designed surveillance, control or operational monitoring programmes to follow the development of status in all (groups of) water bodies. Thus, large amounts of environmental data are being collected, processed and stored throughout Europe (and beyond) for different purposes and different use. A certain amount of these data are collected as a result of the WFD, but probably not all, as water management is a complicated task with many demands, interests and conflicts on local, regional, national and international level. Thus bigger or smaller amounts of data are collected outside the frames of the WFD for other specific purposes

At the same time a large range of hydrological, ecological, economic etc. models exists and are being used more or less successively in the discipline Environmental Management. The Water Framework Directive itself, do not directly prescribe the use of models, but the CIS Guidance Documents mentions modelling both as a support, and option or even recommend models for support when implementing the directive. In fact, the rational behind Harmoni-CA WP4 is that the WFD promotes the interaction between monitoring (=gathering new data) and modelling (e.g. = simulation the hydrological system) in many way and that the 2 disciplines are inextricably linked.

WP4 is working to bring new perspectives into Joint use of monitoring and modelling and to bridge the possible gaps that might exist between the monitoring and the modelling communities.

WP4 is working to bring new perspectives into Joint use of monitoring and modelling and to bridge the possible gaps that might exist between the monitoring and the modelling communities.

To elaborate the issue of joint monitoring and modelling four workshops were organised between 2004 and 2006. Common frames for the workshops have been that it was essential to attract the right people; both with respect to researchers capable of bringing forward ideas, methods and experiences in an easy understandable way but certainly also when it came to practitioners representing the water management world.

This was not an easy task, especially as most national practitioners are not accustomed to attend international conferences or workshops conducted in English. Thus the first bottleneck was to identify the relevant persons and persuade them to participate in the workshops.

In total, we actually managed to get together more than 70 participants representing 18 EC countries plus Bulgaria, Norway and the US during the 4 workshops. The balance between researchers/modellers and water managers were equal, a few representing both sides. Besides, a couple of consultants attended the workshops, mostly presenting tangible examples from all around the world. Many attended more than one workshop and we owe many thanks to all participants for their inspiring and constructive contributions to the workshops.

Experiences, conclusions, recommendations and lessons learned will be used for the final outputs of WP 4

Details on the 4 workshops can be found below as well as links to the workshop reports.

The final output of the work carried out in Harmoni-CA WP4 will be a guideline in “Good practise in combining monitoring and modelling”. In this guidelines good reasons for combined used of monitoring and modelling will be discussed and some easy-to-use methods and tangible examples will be described.

Besides a synthesis report on “Data availability and accessibility - State of the art on existing data required for modelling for research purposes and for the implementation of the Water Framework Directive. The issue of lacking data is often mentioned and the fact that some existing data can not utilised optimally due to various sorts of constraints such as legislation, administrative procedures, pricing policies, lack of capacity to make the data easily/operationally, tradition etc. These topics are discussed in the report ending up with some overall recommendations for regional, national and international authority levels.

Both reports will be reviewed at a Harmoni-CA review workshop in March 2007.

Besides a number of papers have been or is under publishing on the issue:

Jørgensen LF, Højberg AL & Sonnenborg A (2006). Joint use of monitoring and modelling – Harmoni-CA WP4. In: Refsgaard JC & Højberg AL (ed) 2006: Nordic Water 2006. Proceedings. XXIV Nordic Hydrological Conference 2006 – Experiences and Challenges in implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive. NHP Report No. 49.

Højberg AL, Refsgaard JC & Jørgensen LF (2006). Do the WFD monitoring programmes provide sufficient data for modellling? In: Refsgaard JC & Højberg AL (ed) 2006: Nordic Water 2006. Proceedings. XXIV Nordic Hydrological Conference 2006 – Experiences and Challenges in implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive. NHP Report No. 49.

Højberg AL, Refsgaard JC, van Geer F, Jørgensen LF and Zsuffa I (2007) Use of Models to Support the Monitoring Requirements in the Water Framework Directive, Water Resources Management.

Refsgaard JC, Jørgensen LF, Højberg AL, Demetriou C, Onorati G & Brandt G (2007). Joint monitoring and modelling of aquatic ecosystem. Contribution to the Water Framework Directive Conference, Lille March 2007 – in prep.

Interested can contact WP 4:
Lisbeth Flindt Jørgensen
by e-mail: lfj@geus.dkk