The Water Framework Directive (WFD) is a new legislative framework to manage, use, protect, and restore surface water and groundwater resources and coastal waters in the European Union (EU). The aim is to ensure sustainable water management and to reach good water quality by 2015. The assessment of the ecological status and setting of the practical management goals require several steps. The process has started with the characterisation of the river basins including identification of surface water bodies and types, and identification of significant anthropogenic pressures and impacts. The water bodies will be classified in five quality classes (high, good, moderate, poor, bad) based on the Ecological Quality Ratio, which is a ratio between reference conditions and measured status of the biological quality elements. The normative criteria for high, good and moderate ecological status described in the WFD need to be made operational because those will be used to set the practical quality targets for surface water management. National ecological assessment systems and classifications will be harmonised through the WFD intercalibration exercise in order to ensure an equal level of ambition in achieving good surface waters status all over Europe.

AcknowledgmentsThanks to our colleague Egil Sakshaug for his efforts with this manuscript. We also thank Stephen V. Smith and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and help to improve our manuscript.

We propose a definition for identification of blooms and use this definition to investigate the underlying mechanisms of summer blooms and their link to nutrient enrichment. Blooms were defined as chlorophyll a observations deviating significantly from a normal seasonal cycle; the frequency and magnitude of these deviating observations characterized bloom frequency and intensity. The definition was applied to a large monitoring data set from five estuaries in Denmark with at least biweekly sampling. Four mechanisms with links to nutrient enrichment were identified as sources of summer blooms: (1) advection from biomass-rich inner estuary, (2) resuspension of nutrients and algae from sediments, (3) nutrient releases from sediments during hypoxic conditions, and (4) decoupling of benthic grazers. Summer blooms were mostly dominated by diatoms, and in 33% of the bloom samples the dominating species was also dominant prior to the bloom. Only four species (Cerataulina pelagica, Chaetoceros socialis/radians, Prorocentrum micans, and Prorocentrum minimum) typically (.50% of blooms) increased their biomass proportion during bloom initiations. Bloom frequency and intensity decreased from 1989 to 2004, corresponding to decreases in nutrient inputs and concentrations, but only bloom frequency could be directly linked to the actual total nitrogen concentrations, whereas bloom intensities depended on site-specific features, particularly a threshold response for stations exposed to hypoxia. Bloom frequency has increased over longer timescales in response to nutrient enrichment.

We investigated the sedimentation of copepod fecal pellets in three different sea areas representing a sheltered bay, an archipelago area, and the open sea on the southwestern coast of Finland in the northern Baltic Sea. Fecal carbon sedimentation was always Ͻ0.05% of the total sedimentation of particulate organic carbon, whereas the fecal carbon production (estimated from copepod abundance, assuming production rate of 10 pellets copepod Ϫ1 d Ϫ1) contributed to 4-17% of particulate organic carbon sedimentation. Thus, Ͼ99% of copepod fecal material was remineralized within the mixed water layer (0-20 m). However, in the area and season dominated by the large calanoid copepod Limnocalanus macrurus (bay station in spring), fecal carbon sedimentation was an order of magnitude higher than at the other two stations. From June onwards, when the bay station was dominated by cyclopoids, the situation changed: the fecal carbon sedimentation remained 30% lower in the bay than in the archipelago, although the fecal carbon production was estimated to be 2 times higher in the bay. Furthermore, pellet fragmentation (percentage of broken pellets of total fecal carbon sedimentation) was highest in spring and autumn at all areas and increased towards the open sea, being 27%, 45%, and 61% at the bay, archipelago, and open sea stations, respectively. This gradation was probably due to more intense turbulence and water column mixing in the open sea, resulting in more efficient loosening and breakup of pellets. The overall contribution of copepod feces to vertical carbon export in the northern Baltic Sea appears to be small, but seasonal and spatial variations in hydrography and mesozooplankton community structure significantly affect the fecal pellet sedimentation rates.

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