The Water Framework Directive (WFD) expands the scope of water protection to all waters and sets clear objectives that a âgood ecological statusâ must be achieved for all European waters by 2015 and that water use be sustainable throughout Europe. This new overarching system is quite timely as Europe is water resources are facing increasing pressures. There is no time like the present to tackle the challenges and help secure our water resources for today and for future generations.
Article 8 of the Directive establishes the requirements for the monitoring of surface water status, groundwater status and protected areas. Monitoring programmes are required to establish a coherent and comprehensive overview of water status within each river basin district. The programmes have to be operational at the latest by 22 December 2006, and must be in accordance with the requirements of Annex V.
The objective of surface water bodies monitoring is to establish a classification of all water stations into one of five quality classes or to attribute one of five ecological status (table 1).
A water monitoring network shall be designed and operated to provide information on impacts and status of water bodies and assess any change resulting from programmes of measures undertaken in River Basin Plan.
The WFD implementation will require comparability of data and information but at present only general criteria on methods and procedures have been defined. One of these methods are presented in this paper. | 
