The Water Quality Services address the Water Framework Directive (WFD), a main component of the European environmental legislation. Authorities across Europe are obliged to manage, monitor and report the status of the water resources on river basin scale.
The Water Quality Services focus on identification and management of nutrient and pesticide inputs into the water cycle resulting from diffuse and point sources. The products are:
- Land Cover Mapping Products, fine-tuned to directly serve water quality models with key driving parameters,
- GIS data sets enabling spatially explicit working and reporting on issues related to WFD,
- Operating Water Quality Models with a focus on nutrients and plant protection agents to localise and assess the impact of pollution.
The Water Quality products in combination with user-side analysis and management tools efficiently help users to define measures to fulfil the requirements imposed by the WFD, and in particular to define river basin management plans, which should help water bodies to obtain "good status" by 2015. One of the main advantages of the products is that they are designed to take into account ecological / environmental units across administrative borders. This is a particular need for focus-topics of the WFD, namely the management of river basins as a unit and not a conglomerate of administrative units.
