Water Framework Directive.

The Water Framework Directive is widely seen as a major breakthrough in the fight to improve our rivers. Trouble is there appears to be no set criteria as to where the EA have to undertake biodiversity surveys or how representative of a rivers characteristics these sites should be.

This may seem pretty innocuous, but on the Cherwell this freedom has been abused to an extreme. The length from Clifton to Islip (Ray confluence) has its status graded on a streamy riffle back stream, where weed growth is optimal, so insect life is good, good marginal cover, so offering fish sanctuary.
But this is not a true representation of the river, as at most it only represents 10% of the river along that length. Pushing 60% is made up of deep heavily dredged sections and the remainder is a mixture of pools and glides.
Surprise, surprise, despite the EA not being able to show up a single fish in 3yrs of electro fishing on a 2 mile stretch within this 15 mile(ish) length of river - So the river is graded as of "moderate ecological" status, when it patently is poor.

So if anyone else has experience of this type of 'cherry picking' can you please let me know the details either by PM or post, it'd be helpful.

Cg...the starting question should have been "do you know what the water framework directive is?"

i know your brain holds way too much knowledge.....but go easy on them

jasonbean1 said:

Cg...the starting question should have been "do you know what the water framework directive is?"

i know your brain holds way too much knowledge.....but go easy on them

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Yep and it's setout in this
The EU Water Framework Directive - integrated river basin management for Europe - Environment - European Commission

So when you've read, digested, interprated and understood (correctly) do come back to us

i doubt even the EA could come back to you on that one

This 'framework' - will it also include some sort of paneling in between? If not then all the water will run out and make a mess.

jasonbean1 said:

i doubt even the EA could come back to you on that one

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Seeing as the EA have had nearly a decade to get too grips with the 2003 Water Act and are failing miserably: Water Act 2003 - Explanatory Notes

I wouldn't for a second expect them to understand anything other than ways of distorting facts and figures too portray a misleading picture.

Only one PM so far; are these the only cases of misrepresentation??

I would agree with you that many monitoring sites are probably not representative, or at the least there has been little or no effort to determine whether they are. When a single site is being used to represent a whole stream or small river, as many are, it cannot be representative of the different zones from headwater downstream.

The sampling locations used by the EA were sometimes established back in the 1970s or 1980s, at which time all "ecological" monitoring was driven by water quality (pollution status) assessment. At that time sites with poor habitat may have been avoided because they wanted to monitor the water quality rather than habitat quality - so tried to rule out other factors.

Some regions as part of their biological monitoring only examined the gravel areas in riffles and ignored river margins or deeper water altogether (ie not interested in biodiversity at all). When standard nation-wide methods came along these were for shallow sampling sites. Some sites may subsequently have been retained over the intervening years simply because they provide a long-term monitoring dataset rtaher than being suitable for WFD needs.