How will the data be used for river basin planning?

Data collected will help to inform the classification of water bodies, the setting of environmental objectives and the design of programmes of measures to deliver those objectives.

It will take time, however, to obtain enough monitoring data to understand natural and seasonal trends, especially in terms of biological quality elements. A sufficient degree of confidence in the monitoring data is required to make decisions about how to manage the water body.

Therefore, for the first River Basin Management Plans, all environment agencies will be using both new and existing data to assess risk and to classify water bodies. In some cases, this may include data collected from other agencies.