Life is Salaca project develops a new methodology for assessing the health of rivers

Within the Life is Salaca project, the Latvian Environment, Geology and Meteorology Centre and the Nature Conservation Agency have developed a new approach to assessing the health of rivers, based on a common methodology for the Water Framework Directive and the Habitats Directive. In the course of developing the methodology, a new river inventory protocol has been created, along with detailed instructions for filling it in. The new, harmonised protocol combines the requirements of both directives – the Water Framework Directive and the Habitats Directive. Although both directives share a common goal – to achieve good quality in freshwater ecosystems – their approaches to achieving it differ. This is also one of the tasks of the Life is Salaca project: to harmonise, or align, the Water Framework Directive and the Habitats Directive.

The common protocol integrates information from the standard data form of the River Habitat Survey (RHS) developed in the United Kingdom, adapted to Latvian conditions, and also contains most of the parameters included in the inventory form for the EU-importance running freshwater habitat 3260 Water courses of plain to montane levels. The data obtained will therefore be multi-purpose: they can be used to calculate the hydromorphological quality index used in national monitoring, to calculate the river macrophyte index intercalibrated in Latvia, and to determine the quality of running freshwater habitats of EU importance. Importantly, the new methodology will be easy to integrate into the river hydromorphological assessment framework developed in the LIFE GoodWater IP project. Surveying rivers with the new, common protocol will produce data that various institutions involved in water research, assessment and management can use for their own needs. This will promote more efficient resource management, reducing the overall cost of national monitoring, and will improve the quality of the data obtained and make the data comparable.

In May, experts from the Latvian Environment, Geology and Meteorology Centre, the Nature Conservation Agency and the state scientific institute “BIOR” tested the new, common protocol in the field to make sure that all the parameters assessed in the protocol represent the situation in nature well enough, and to improve the protocol where necessary. The testing was carried out in two rivers of the Salaca basin – the Korģe and the Jaunupe – as well as in the Ēda, a right-bank tributary of the Venta. The Ēda survey was carried out together with colleagues from the LIFE GoodWater IP project, encouraging the exchange of expert knowledge and views between the two projects working in water management.

In mid-June, extensive fieldwork will start within Life is Salaca, during which experts will survey both the Salaca and its larger and smaller tributaries, walking and boating along a total of 71 km of rivers. The data collected during the field expeditions will serve as the basis for the project’s further activities – an overall assessment of the ecological quality of the rivers, the development of a comparative index for both directives, an assessment of ecosystem services, and monitoring of the impact of the project’s results.