Environmental Change Research Unit - ECRU

EMERGE

EUROPEAN MOUNTAIN LAKE ECOSYSTEMS: REGIONALISATION, DIAGNOSTICS & SOCIO-ECONOMIC EVALUATION ( EMERGE )

EC Energy, Environment and Sustainable Development, Sub-Programme Environment and Sustainable Development; Contract EVK1-CT-1999-00032.

Duration: 2000-2003

General description:

Remote mountain lakes and their catchments form headwaters form water supply throughout Europe. However, both water quality and the ecological status of these systems is threatened and, in some cases, impaired by the separate and combined impacts of acid deposition, trace metal/organic pollution and climate change. The project is designed to support the Water Framework Directive with reference to lakes. The project should supply all the information required under the Framework Directive for the population of over 20,000 lakes in Europe situated above or beyond the timber line. Existing data on structure and functioning of these lakes will be combined with new data from representative sites in each mountain Lake District and the data will be used to classify sites into ecotypes. The kind and extent of anthropogenic impact for individual lakes and for entire Lake Districts will be assessed both from on-site measurements and from regionalised modelling. These impacts will be distinguished from effects of natural variability using data from palaeolimnological studies, long-term chemical, biological and meteorological datasets from key reference sites, and from regional comparisons across Europe of lakes with different pollution environments and along major environmental gradients. These data will enable us to assess the extent to which lakes have deviated from a baseline or unimpacted reference condition and will allow criteria to be established to allow a classification of sites into those with "high", "good" and "fair" status as required by the Framework Directive.

The EMERGE project is innovative in many ways:

1. understanding processes;
2. the development of regionalisation methodologies;
3. the development of a mountain lake classification scheme;
4. the production of critical loads maps for acidity and the exploration of critical loads methodology for POPs and metals;
5. the socio-economic assessment of mountain lake environments and
6. the combination of scientific research and policy evaluation in an integrated programme.

Specific objectives:

• to assess the status of remote mountain lake ecosystems throughout Europe following the requirements of the EU Water Framework Directive;
• to provide an evaluation of our findings in ecological, environmental and socio-economic terms;
• to provide decision makers with an overall understanding of remote mountain lakes so that appropriate policy and management measures can be taken at both European and national scales to ensure the sustainability of these ecosystems into the future.

To achieve these goals it is necessary: (i) to improve our understanding of some key processes; (ii) to develop existing and new models for up-scaling from individual sites to regions (Lake Districts); (iii) carry out an evaluation of environmental and biological datasets; (v) carry out socio-economic assessments; and (vi) communicate our results with the user community.

Project partners:

Co-ordinator: Simon Patrick, University College London (UK)

Partners:

• University of Helsinki (Finland)
• University of Edinburgh (UK)
• Norwegian Water Research Institute , Oslo (Norway)
• University of East Anglia (UK)
• University of Innsbruck (Austria)
• Institute of Limnology , Mondsee (Austria)
• University of Barcelona (Spain)
• University of Granada (Spain)
• University of Bordeaux , Arcachon (France)
• Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique , France
• Consejo Superior De Investigaciones Cientificas , Barcelona (Spain)
• University of Bergen (Norway)
• Instituto Italiano di Idrobiologia , Pallanza (Italy)
• University of Liverpool (UK)
• Swiss Federal Institute for Environmental Science & Technology , Dübendorf (Switzerland)
• University of Zurich (Switzerland)
• University of Bern (Switzerland)
• Sezione della Protezione dell'aria e dell'acqua , Laboratorio Studi Ambientali (Switzerland)
• Agricultural University of Norway (Norway)
• University of Copenhagen (Denmark)
• Charles University , Prague (Czech Republic)
• Hydrobiological Institute , Ceske Budejovice (Czech Republic)
• Institute of Zoology , Bratislava (Slovak Republic)
• Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Bulgaria)
• Institute of Freshwater Biology, Kracow (Poland)
• National Institute of Biology , Ljubljana (Slovenia)

Finnish research team:

• Atte Korhola (national co-ordinator)
• Sanna Sorvari
• Milla Rautio
• Timo Tarvainen ( Geological Survey of Finland )
• Philipp Smith-Thomé ( Geological Survey of Finland )