Susanne Klages, Nicolas Surdyk, Christophoros Christophoridis, Birgitte Hansen, Claudia Heidecke, Abel Henriot, Hyojin Kim, Sonja Schimmelpfennig
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One of FAIRWAY’s objectives was to identify, select and prioritize transparent and data-driven indicators for monitoring of the impacts of agriculture activities on drinking water quality, referred as Agri-Drinking Water Indicators (ADWIs). ADWIs are intended to assist agricultural consultancy, therefore, they should be appealing and understandable for farmers. On a larger scale, ADWIs are intended to support central and local administration and policy-makers, water companies in analysing the situation of diffuse pollution and selecting measures to protect drinking water resources.
All ADWIs discussed in the report are listed in Table 1, i. e. those being subject of the survey among the case studies, those proposed by the case study leaders to be included in a further evaluation and those which, according to a literature review, are used for pesticide and nitrate monitoring/risk assessment.
From the number of indicators listed and further explained in the report, it can be deduced, that indicators which act in the agricultural sector as Driving forces and as Pressure indicators, are far more numerous than State respectively Impact indicators. The large number of agricultural Driving forces and Pressure ADWIs also explaines, that from this part of the DPSLIR-model, many factors may influence water pollution. State indicators which are used for the evaluation of the water quality are on the contrary far more standardised, like the water quality standards they are supposed to monitor.
A survey on ADWIs already used in case studies was carried out to select the most promising indicators. A first weighting of indicators is listed in Table 2. On the right part of the table, three columns show the ranking of (sub)indicators in use in the FAIRWAY case studies according to their data availability in order to calculate ADWI. Answers would also indicate the resolution in space, in which data can be delivered from the case studies (at plot, farm or regional/larger scale).
In Table 2, ADWI for which data can be supplied by the case studies are marked in orange. ADWI for which data can (possibly) not be supplied by case studies are marked in blue. These data may possibly not be used in certain or all case studies to calculate those indicators.
The reason why case studies do not collect specific data, may be due to national requirements (these data are not part of the national legislation) or due to the case study -specific goals (nitrate polluted site do not spend much on pesticide analyses).
This constrains aims to calculate the same indicators in each site. Indicators, for which data are not readily available in the case studies can not be calculated except if these data are freely available from other data sources.
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