Preface: ‘Quantitative ecological responses for the Water Framework Directive related to eutrophication and acidification of European lakes’

Abstract

This special issue of Aquatic Ecology presents most of the results on lakes from the EU FP6 project REBECCA, ‘‘Relationships between ecological and chemical status of surface waters’’, that were obtained during the project period 2004 to 2007. The REBECCA project has been funded by the EU Commission DG Research (Contract no. SSPI-CT2003-502158), and was also supported by national research funds and partner institutions. The objective of REBECCA has been to provide scientific support for the implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) (EC 2000). Knowledge on relationships between the biological and physico-chemical properties of surface waters is a prerequisite for a successful implementation of the WFD, because dose-response relationships are needed to enable the management of catchments and to ensure that water bodies will achieve the ecological objective. This objective is defined as good ecological status for a given type of water body, and it is therefore essential to identify the boundary between good and moderate ecological status. More information about the REBECCA project is available at the project website: www.environment.fi/syke/rebecca. The production of papers for this Special issue of Aquatic Ecology started in May 2006 with a fruitful and pleasant workshop that took place in a beautiful, ancient monastery at the shore of Lago di Como in Varenna, Northern Italy, kindly organised by Gianni Tartari at IRSA, CNR, Italy. The spirit and enthusiasm created at this workshop, as well as the beautiful surroundings and inspiring discussions, have been the basis for the commitment of all authors to complete the articles included here. It is a great pleasure to see that our common efforts have now finally reached its goal. Most of the results presented in this Special issue of Aquatic Ecology were also discussed at the REBECCA final conference in Oslo, Norway, in May, 2007 that was organised by the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA) (Norway), Finnish Environment Institute (Finland) and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UK). Since REBECCA has been a policy support project, dissemination of preliminary results to water managers has also been done during the project period at annual meetings, as deliverables available at the project website, as well as at the regular workshops of the ECOSTAT working group that is responsible for the WFD-required intercalibration of classification systems for assessment of ecological status in surface waters. The articles in this issue are, however, the only scientific publications of these results, providing A. Lyche Solheim (&) Norwegian Institute for Water Research, Oslo, Norway e-mail: anne.lyche@niva.no