INTERCALIBRATION PROCESS OF ASSESSMENT METHODS FOR BIOLOGICAL QUALITY ELEMENTS OF ECOLOGICAL STATUS IN SURFACE WATERS: MACRO-INVERTEBRATES AND PHYTOBENTHOS

摘要

Intercalibration process introduces a complex set of rules and specific tasks (qualitative and quantitative) arising from requirements of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) 2000/60/ /EC. As a result, one obtains fully harmonized ecological quality boundaries for various biological quality elements (BQE - macro-invertebrates, phytobenthos, macrophytes, phytoplankton and fishes). The boundaries are harmonized among participating member states of the European Union, which are distributed into geographical intercalibration groups (GIGs).The main precondition of the process is to define a set of general principles in a full correspondence with the normative definitions of WFD and to apply them in a well-established sequence of single steps, which are all carefully supervised. The aim of this paper is to offer a systematic and brief overview of the intercalibration process: we list the main steps of the intercalibration exercise and we show their application under the specific conditions of the Eastern Continental GIG. A team of experts from the Czech Republic fully accounted for the whole process to the European Commission.