Differences in monitoring approaches and implementation of EU directives across Europe

The European Commission recently published (November 2012) the 3rd assessment of the European River Basin Management Plans (RBMP) and the implementation of the Water Framework Directive (WFD). The commission observe that the status improvements are generally not as fast as planned, and it has recommendations specifically for all EU member states e.g. on the design of monitoring programmes. In the following, I will compare current monitoring approaches in the Netherlands and Denmark with approaches in other selected EU member states for both the WFD and the Nitrates Directive (NiD). I will discuss how these relate to the recommendations from the EU commission and what we can learn from the experiences with the NiD.