Review of European Databases of Inland Waters Used in the MARS Spatial Database Development for the Purpose of Multiple Pressure Analysis

Abstract

With respect to the various European polices for water and environment protection, EU member states report to the European Commission through national monitoring programmes a wide variety of data on the pressures that aquatic ecosystems are facing. They further report data on the quality and quantity of water (“State of Environment”) at monitoring sites, and on the ecological and chemical status of surface waters under the Water Framework Directive. Many other databases on European waters (hydrographical databases as well as databases on state of water) were developed as a result of different European projects. There are also several sources about climatic data, data on river discharges, and data on pressures the water system is facing. All these databases are a welcome source of information, needed to analyse the pressures on and state of European inland waters, but they must be interlinked, harmonised, and entered into a common spatial database first. This was done within the MARS project, where we have interlinked and unified relevant available databases into a new spatial database. Data are now available in a new form to be used in analysis of state of inland aquatic ecosystems as a response to multiple pressures.