OSPAR Commission

The Common Procedure for the Identification of the Eutrophication Status of the OSPAR Maritime Area. OSPAR Agreement 2022-07 (Replaces Agreement 2013-08). [ENDORSED PRACTICE]

2025-10-23T12:43:06Z

The Common Procedure for the Identification of the Eutrophication Status of the OSPAR Maritime Area. OSPAR Agreement 2022-07 (Replaces Agreement 2013-08). [ENDORSED PRACTICE] The Common Procedure is the harmonised methodology developed and agreed by OSPAR Contracting Parties for assessing eutrophication in the North-East Atlantic, incorporating the best available scientific knowledge to interpret and assess eutrophication in the North-East Atlantic. In accordance with the ecosystem approach, the Common Procedure is part of a continuous cycle of (i) setting and coordinating ecological objectives and associated targets and indicators, (ii) ongoing management and (iii) regular updates of ecosystem knowledge, research, and advice. Monitoring, assessment, and adaptive management are essential elements for implementing the ecosystem approach. 1.3 OSPAR describes eutrophication status in terms of ‘Problem’ and ‘Non-problem’ areas. The ultimate aim of the OSPAR eutrophication strategy is to achieve and maintain non-problem status in all parts of the OSPAR maritime area by 2030. This document is the OSPAR Agreement reached by Contracting Parties describing how, when and where the Common Procedure will be applied to deliver an assessment. 1.4 Although the aim is to achieve non-problem status for all areas before 2030 it is important to recognise that there is a time lag from lowering the pressure, i.e. reducing the nutrient inputs, until the state of the marine ecosystems actually improves (Lønborg and Markager 2021). 1.5 This Agreement defines the Fourth Application of the Common Procedure. The first application was applied nationally in 2002 with a joint report published 200325. Subsequent applications resulted in joint reports in 200826 and 201727 which contributed to the OSPAR Quality Status Report 2010 and the Intermediate Assessment 2017. This fourth application will provide a basis for the OSPAR Quality Status Report 2023. With the third application, OSPARs eutrophication assessments covered the period from 2006 – 2014 and a long-term period with data back to 1990 for trend assessments in addition. The fourth application will extend this, incorporating data from 2015 – 2020. This fourth application reflects the adaptive management of the ecosystem approach, incorporating a major revision in assessment areas and thresholds based on the best available scientific knowledge from EU projects such as JMP EUNOSAT28, and further developed in OSPARs own Ecological Modelling group ICG-EMO.

OSPAR Joint Assessment and Monitoring Programme (JAMP) 2024-2028 OSPAR Agreement 2024-01.

2024-11-19T20:03:27Z

OSPAR Joint Assessment and Monitoring Programme (JAMP) 2024-2028 OSPAR Agreement 2024-01. Monitoring and assessment of the North-East Atlantic is the basis for better understanding its status and is essential to support and guide OSPAR’s work to protect the marine environment. The Joint Assessment and Monitoring Programme’s (JAMP) primary purpose is to describe the products OSPAR Contracting Parties are committed to deliver, through collaborative efforts, to deliver OSPAR Contracting Parties’ obligations in Article 6 and Annex IV of the OSPAR Convention to: a. undertake and publish regular joint assessments of the quality status of the marine environment and of its development; and b. assess the effectiveness of measures and identify priorities for action. 2. It sets out a framework to provide the evidence needed by Contracting Parties: a. to take all possible steps to prevent and eliminate pollution; 1 Replaces OSPAR Agreement 2014-02 OSPAR Convention Joint Assessment and Monitoring Programme (JAMP) JAMP assessment products for next joint quality status report List of and timings of required assessment products JAMP new products Development of new monitoring/assessment products CEMP – agreed monitoring specifications (including Appendices and Guidelines) Regular JAMP assessment products (not in next QSR) Details of regular OSPAR assessment products. b. to take measures to protect the OSPAR maritime area against the adverse effects of human activities; and c. to protect and conserve marine species and habitats and, where practicable restore marine areas that have been adversely affected. 3. It supports implementation of the North-East Atlantic Environment Strategy (NEAES) 2030 (NEAES) and, for those Contracting Parties that are also EU Member States, implementation of the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD, Directive 2008/56/EC2). 4. The last OSPAR Quality Status Report was published in 2023 in line with the framework established under the JAMP 2014-2023. This revision replaces the previous JAMP 2014-2023 and is designed to guide delivery of the next OSPAR joint quality status report.

JAMP Eutrophication Monitoring Guidelines: Benthos (OSPAR Agreement 2012-12).

2024-08-22T21:09:13Z

JAMP Eutrophication Monitoring Guidelines: Benthos (OSPAR Agreement 2012-12). Benthic communities (including hard-bottom and soft-bottom macrophytobenthos and hard-bottom and soft-bottom macrozoobenthos) generally occur in recognisable states, depending on the substrate, depth, wave exposure and salinity etc. Macrobenthic communities are an appropriate target for monitoring since: a) an important component of benthic communities is that formed by species which are long-lived and which therefore integrate environmental change over long periods of time; b) they are relatively easy to sample quantitatively; c) they are well-studied scientifically, compared with other sediment-dwelling components (e.g. meiofauna and microfauna) and taxonomic keys are available for most groups; d) community structure responds in a predictable manner to a number of anthropogenic influences (thus, the results of change can be interpreted with a degree of confidence); e) there may be direct links with commercially valued resources, e.g. fish (via feeding) and edible molluscs; f) the floral part integrates long-term change of water quality (turbidity). Nutrient enrichment/eutrophication may increase the food supply to the benthos and therefore may give rise to changes in species composition and numbers, increased biomass, a shift from k-selected to r-selected species, shifts in functional groups, changes in community structure and an impoverishment of benthic communities due to anoxia. These guidelines are intended to support the minimum monitoring requirements of the Monitoring Programme. Much information exists on methodology for benthos investigations. The most relevant reports are those by Rumohr (2009) which deals largely with methodology for the collection and treatment of the soft-bottom macrofauna, and by Rees et al. (1991) and Rees (2009) which focus on the monitoring of benthic communities around point-source discharges and epibenthic studies, respectively. These accounts also deal more generally with the role of benthos studies in investigations of human impact, including guidance on the sampling of different substrate types. The HELCOM ‘COMBINE’ manual for monitoring in the Baltic Sea is another important reference source (see www.helcom.fi). A range of other documents are of value in the planning and carrying out of marine benthos sampling programmes. The most useful is that by Eleftheriou and McIntyre (2005) which is a standard reference for work of this type. Gray et al. (1992) report on approaches to marine pollution assessment and provide practical examples of applying the PRIMER (‘Plymouth Routines in Multivariate Ecological Research’) package for univariate, graphical and multivariate data analyses (see Clarke and Gorley, 2001 for further details). Kramer et al. (1994) have produced a manual for the sampling of tidal estuaries. An account of survey methods employed by a team of scientists undertaking a review of marine nature conservation in UK inshore waters together with a rationale for such work is given by Hiscock (1996), Davies et al. (2001) and Connor et al. (2004). A monitoring programme and monitoring guidelines have been prepared for the Wadden Sea ‘Trilateral Monitoring and Assessment Programme’ (TMAP, 2000). The last update of this document was mainly to harmonize it with the EN ISO 16665 (2005) a European and International Standard on quantitative sampling and sample processing of marine soft-bottom macrofauna. For marine biological surveys of hard-substrate communities the EN ISO 19493 (2007) gives advice. These EN ISO guidelines are mandatory regulations which have to take over in national regulations and should be consulted when detailed questions on sampling and sample processing are to be cleared.

OSPAR CEMP Guideline. Common indicator: Condition of benthic habitat communities (BH2) – common approach. OSPAR Agreement 2018-06. Updated 2022/2023.

2025-09-30T12:06:11Z

OSPAR CEMP Guideline. Common indicator: Condition of benthic habitat communities (BH2) – common approach. OSPAR Agreement 2018-06. Updated 2022/2023. These guidelines outline the monitoring and assessment requirements for the OSPAR common approach: “condition of benthic habitat communities (BH2)”. More detailed technical specifications for this indicator are in Annex 1. As a conceptual “umbrella” (see below), it is recommended that, in the future, a set of guidelines (according to each habitat and pressure types to be assessed) should be developed for this common approach to operationalise it at its full potential (all MSFD/OSPAR issues for benthic habitats) and update OSPAR CEMP to ensure coherence and comparability at (sub)-regional scale. Specific applications of the indicator to date are described in Annex 2 and Annex 3. These applications contributed to the OSPAR Intermediate Assessment (BH2-A and BH2-B).

OSPAR CEMP Guideline. Common indicator PH2 “Changes in Phytoplankton Biomass and Zooplankton Abundance”. Adopted by BDC(2) 2022, OSPAR Agreement 2019-06. Updated 2023.

2025-09-30T12:21:15Z

OSPAR CEMP Guideline. Common indicator PH2 “Changes in Phytoplankton Biomass and Zooplankton Abundance”. Adopted by BDC(2) 2022, OSPAR Agreement 2019-06. Updated 2023. Plankton biomass and/or abundance in the ocean are hydro-climatic variables and as such have been demonstrated to reflect environmental changes, as illustrated by already numerous phytoplankton and zooplankton published studies. Being at the base of the food-web and representing a food of importance for numerous species of higher trophic levels, such as fish of commercial interest, the fluctuation of plankton biomass and/or abundance can have significant impacts on the whole trophic food web but also on carbon cycles and nutrient recycling. The intrinsic characteristics of these organisms at the base of the food web, such as small size, short life cycles and distribution over the whole globe, render them particularly interesting in the frame of monitoring programmes and they have a high potential to reflect environmental changes at short and long-term scales in the marine systems. In practice, the use of total biomass and/or abundance is often favoured over indicators using species, since indices of species-specific abundance are frequently subject to large inter-annual variation, often due to natural physical dynamics rather than anthropogenic stressors (de Jonge, 2007). Combining both phytoplankton biomass and zooplankton abundance can provide an indication of changes in the energy transfer from primary to secondary producers. The indicator is still under development. Further investigations are needed to precise the assessment method, and to make the indicator flexible enough to include data from innovative approaches and techniques (see further). Since different indices provide complementary information on the community structure, we propose a combination of diversity indices to assess GES for plankton communities. Moreover, each PH indicator considers the community at different resolutions, PH1 at the life-form level of the community, PH2 the total biomass/abundance of the community and PH3 at the species level. Hence, by combining the information from these three indicators, a more holistic assessment of plankton dynamics can be obtained than from each indicator individually.

OSPAR CEMP Guideline. Common indicator PH3 “Changes in Plankton Diversity”.Adopted by BDC(2) 2022, OSPAR Agreement 2019-07. Updated 2023.

2025-09-30T12:19:35Z

OSPAR CEMP Guideline. Common indicator PH3 “Changes in Plankton Diversity”.Adopted by BDC(2) 2022, OSPAR Agreement 2019-07. Updated 2023. Species composition and abundance of plankton assemblages are influenced by environmental conditions and their variability, such as available light, nutrients, prey, currents and climate. As a result, plankton communities fluctuate in space and time. Environmental perturbations such as pollution and/or eutrophication (i.e. excessive nutrients) can create unusual marked changes in community composition because only a small number of species can cope with/benefit rapidly from the new situation. In the Baltic Sea, for example, phytoplankton species composition has been observed to change with different nutrient levels and ratios (HELCOM, 2017 and references therein). Monitoring plankton diversity is important since long-term and drastic changes in biodiversity can alter marine ecosystems in terms of their functioning, such as food webs and the uptake and transfer of carbon in the oceans, and the services they provide. In order to quantify changes in biodiversity, indices based on the number of species and/or their relative abundances in the community can be calculated for water quality assessment. A plethora of indices exist in the scientific literature but their use depends on (1) the objective of the study, (2) their ecological relevance and (3) mathematical properties. Currently, taxonomic diversity indicators for plankton are being revised within the Marine Strategy Framework Directive for French waters (Duflos et al., 2018). In a wider management context (MSFD), only a few community composition indicators are currently applied and this probably reflects the difficulty in setting reference conditions and environmental objectives for these indicators (Garmendia et al., 2013). On the other hand, diversity indices are relatively easy to calculate and their interpretations are intuitive.

OSPAR CEMP Guideline. Common indicator: PH1/FW5 Change in plankton communities. OSPAR Agreement 2018-07. Adopted by BDC(2) 2022, Update 2023.

2025-09-30T12:22:54Z

OSPAR CEMP Guideline. Common indicator: PH1/FW5 Change in plankton communities. OSPAR Agreement 2018-07. Adopted by BDC(2) 2022, Update 2023. Indicators based on plankton lifeforms have been used to assess community response to sewage pollution (Charvet et al. 1998; Tett et al. 2008), anoxia (Rakocinski 2012), fishing (Bremner et al. 2004), eutrophication (HELCOM 2012), climate change (Beaugrand 2005; Bedford et al. 2020; McQuatters-Gollop et al. 2019), and ocean acidification (Keys et al. 2018). Indicators based on functional groups have been proven relevant for the description of the community’s structure and biodiversity and are more easily inter-compared than other indicators based on taxonomy (Estrada et al. 2004; Gallego et al. 2012; Garmendia et al. 2012; Mouillot et al. 2006). In practice, it is often preferable to aggregate species with similar traits into functional groups, such as lifeforms, rather than assessing the dynamics of individual species. Measures of species abundance are frequently subject to large interannual and regional variation, often due to natural physical dynamics and habitat preferences rather than anthropogenic stressors (de Jonge 2007). Functional group abundance is often less variable because variability in the abundances of the group’s constituent species averages out. Cryptic speciation (species with near-identical appearance) within the plankton community, alongside the limitations of identifying plankton using routine light microscopy techniques, make it difficult to generate accurate counts at a species or genus level. Functional group abundance is more reliable as many plankton lifeforms are easily identified, making comparisons between different laboratories and institutes feasible. Both abundance and biomass data can be used to inform lifeform time-series, depending on the lifeform in question and data availability from monitoring programmes.

CEMP Guidelines: Phytoplankton monitoring. (OSPAR Agreement 2016-06).

2024-08-21T17:16:58Z

CEMP Guidelines: Phytoplankton monitoring. (OSPAR Agreement 2016-06). This document describes phytoplankton species composition monitoring guidelines for the OSPAR area. “Phytoplankton” is here used throughout as a simple umbrella term to encompass prokaryotes as well as eukaryotes, but is limited to protists, whatever their size and trophic mode (i.e. auto-mixo or heterotroph). Micrometazoa <200 um and also larger metazoans are thus excluded from this definition. The scope of the guidelines includes eutrophication, biodiversity, invasive species, harmful algal blooms and climate change. This document replaces the document ‘JAMP Eutrophication Monitoring Guidelines: Phytoplankton Species Composition’, adopted 1997 in Brussels. (Ref. No.: Agreement 1997-05).

Convention-wide Practices and Procedures in relation to marine dumped chemical weapons and munitions (2004 Update).

2022-03-09T18:34:04Z

Convention-wide Practices and Procedures in relation to marine dumped chemical weapons and munitions (2004 Update). As part of a broader overview of the issue of dumped conventional and chemical munitions in the OSPAR area, in response to a request by OSPAR (OSPAR 00/20/1, §10.15), Ireland has prepared the following assessment of the practices and procedures of Contracting Parties in relation to marine dumped chemical weapons and munitions. In order to collate the relevant information to complete this task, a questionnaire (attached as Appendix I) was circulated to Contracting Parties to gather information on the following three key topics: a. Reporting, Recording and Assessment of Encounters with Marine Dumped Conventional and Chemical Munitions; b. Guidelines for Fishermen and Other Users of the Sea and its Coastline; and c. Surveillance and Management Practices.

CEMP Guidelines for marine monitoring and assessment of beach litter.

2022-03-02T10:20:47Z

CEMP Guidelines for marine monitoring and assessment of beach litter. 1.1. The reduction of pollution of the marine environment by macro- and microlitter is one of the great environmental challenges facing society today. 1.2. Under its draft North-East Atlantic Environment (NEAE) Strategy 2020-2030, OSPAR has a strategic objective to significantly reduce marine litter to levels that do not cause adverse impacts. This level, referred to as “Good Environmental Status” (GES), is also the objective set by the European Union (EU) in the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD, 2008/56/EC). 1.3. Measures to reduce the input of marine litter and to remove litter from the marine environment are presently being implemented through actions at the OSPAR level (OSPAR Marine Litter Regional Action Plan/ML RAP) and through national actions. For Contracting Parties (CPs) who are EU Member States, measures implemented within the scope of the MSFD also contribute towards this objective. To direct these actions and assess their effectiveness in reducing marine litter pollution, but also to assess if GES and associated threshold values (TVs, Werner et al. 2020) are being achieved, indicators have been developed. Regarding marine litter, one of these indicators is the “Abundance, composition and trends of marine litter washed ashore and/or deposited on coastlines, including analysis of its spatial distribution and, where possible, sources”, referred to as “beach litter”. The indicator reflects spatial differences and temporal changes in abundance, composition and sources of marine litter in the coastal environment and is used as a proxy for litter pollution in the OSPAR marine environment. 1.4. Beach litter is defined by OSPAR as any persistent, manufactured or processed, solid material discarded, disposed of or abandoned in the marine and coastal environment, and encountered on beaches. A part of this litter originates from the sea, through deliberate or accidental losses from vessels (including cargos and waste), and transported to and deposited on the coast from the sea by winds and water currents. Another part is directly deposited on the coast by humans, e.g. tourists, fishers or the results of fly-tipping. Litter is also deposited further inland on riverbanks, directly into rivers, in urban areas and in the countryside and is subsequently transported by rivers, rain and wind into the marine environment and onto beaches. In addition, sewage infrastructures discharge litter items directly or indirectly, via rivers and sewage outlets into the sea and these items can be washed ashore. 1.5. The aim of this document is to provide guidelines for the monitoring and assessment programme for the OSPAR beach litter indicator that allows effective (i) detection of spatial differences and temporal changes in abundance, composition and, if possible, sources of litter encountered on beach monitoring sites and within country-regions, (ii) assessment of GES and associated TV achievement and (iii) evaluation of the effects and efficiency of OSPAR ML-RAP actions.