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Article 8.1 of the WFD requires Member States to establish monitoring programmes for the assessment of the status of surface water and of groundwater in order to provide a coherent and comprehensive overview of water status within each RBD. These requirements include monitoring of Protected Areas as far as the status of surface water and groundwater is concerned. The results of monitoring play a key role in determining whether water bodies are of good status and what measures need to be included in the RBMPs in order to reach good status by 2015. Precise and reliable monitoring results are therefore a prerequisite for sound planning of investments in the Programmes of Measures (PoMs).

The WFD implementation reports required by Article 18 of the WFD should include, among other aspects, ‘a review of the status of surface water and groundwater in the Community undertaken in co-ordination with the European Environment Agency’. In the first implementation report, this review was based on both the State of the Environment (SoE) information provided by EEA Member Countries through the EIONET reporting process, and the status and pressure results reported at water body level (chapter 2 and 3 of this guidance) by Member States. Better streamlining between WFD and SoE reporting is still needed to ensure the most beneficial outcome of this two-level approach. For the second RBMPs, the review of status under Article 18 could significantly benefit from the inclusion of the WFD monitoring results on water quality data and biological data into the overall status assessment. Details could be included on the development of progress made since the first RBMPs, for example in the trends of status, pressures and impacts, and where objectives have not been fully met.

Reporting should reflect the monitoring carried out that has informed the second RBMPs. Given that monitoring programmes are usually dynamic and multi-annual (i.e. in the cases of quality elements with lower frequencies of monitoring), reporting should reflect, as accurately as possible, the monitoring that has informed the preparation of the second RBMPs. Reporting is not intended to include information regarding future monitoring programmes or planned changes.

The selection of the quality elements (QEs) and parameters to be monitored should enable the detection of all significant pressures on water bodies. This is particularly important where the pressures and impacts assessments may not have been adequate enough to identify all potential pressures and impacts in the RBD, perhaps because of the lack of information or methods, or because of unexpected, anthropogenic activities within the RBD.

The results of surveillance monitoring should ensure that the potential impacts of all pressures on water bodies in the RBDs are detected. Incomplete coverage of QEs and water bodies in surveillance monitoring could lead to the non-detection of significant pressures, the incorrect classification of water status, and inappropriate targeting of measures. Surveillance monitoring must also be able to detect long-term natural changes and those arising from anthropogenic pressures.

The selection of biological quality elements (BQEs) for operational monitoring should focus on those most sensitive to the identified pressures and impacts on water bodies. The results of operational monitoring are used (together with the results of surveillance monitoring) in the classification of water bodies and to monitor progress of implemented measures in achieving the objectives of the Directive.

The results of monitoring are used in the assessment and classification of the status of water bodies (ecological and chemical for surface waters, chemical and quantitative for groundwater). The amount of monitoring undertaken in terms of QEs, parameters, frequency and numbers of monitoring sites should be sufficient to obtain a reliable and robust assessment of the status of all water bodies in the RBDs. Insufficient monitoring leads to a low confidence in the classification of water bodies and, as a result, the (expensive) measures required to achieve objectives may be incorrectly targeted, and/or objectives such as the restoration of water bodies to good status may not be achieved.

Directive 2009/90/EC lays down technical specifications for the chemical analysis and monitoring of water status with the aim of improving the quality and comparability of monitoring results by establishing minimum performance criteria for methods of analysis to be applied by Member States when monitoring water status, sediment and biota, as well as rules for demonstrating the quality of analytical results.