The Water Framework Directive is the key EU legislation requiring Member States to improve and sustainably manage and protect water quality in all surface water bodies. Under the WFD, all EU Member States are obliged to develop a river typology upon which type-specific reference conditions can be defined to enable accurate evaluation of ecological status. Ecological status is determined on the basis of deviation from these type-specific reference conditions. Four rare river types were not adequately represented in the development of the existing national typology and so it is not known whether they were sufficiently characterised by the current 12 national river types or represent distinct types. Rare river types are defined here as stretches of river that present naturally challenging combinations of environmental conditions for aquatic biota potentially limiting the range of organisms that occur there. The four potentially rare river types identified as being poorly represented or in some cases omitted entirely from the development of the national types were: 1) groundwater-dominated rivers; 2) highly calcareous rivers with calcium precipitation, 3) low conductivity, naturally acidic rivers; and 4) rivers strongly influenced by lakes. To determine if they were adequately charcterised by current river types, the biological communities of five potential reference sites from each rare type were analysed alongside the data used to define the national typology. Results showed that potential rare river types did not host communities sufficiently distinct from the national types to justify defining new national river types. The effectiveness of current assessment metrics was assessed across a gradient of pollution. The findings indicated that small adjustments in terms of indicator taxa may be needed in the application of some of the metrics. Overall, this work provides a solid foundation for making a series of decisions to improve assessment of the true ecological status of sites that fall under these headings.

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Hannigan, E. Kelly-Quinn, M.   "Characterisation of reference conditions for rare or unusual river typologies". Associated datasets and digitial information objects connected to this resource are available at: Secure Archive For Environmental Research Data (SAFER) managed by Environmental Protection Agency Ireland https://eparesearch.epa.ie/safer/resource?id=fced8a0f-540e-11e6-ab63-005056ae0019 (Last Accessed: 2025-01-16)

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SAFER-Data Display URL	https://eparesearch.epa.ie/safer/iso19115/display?isoID=3139
Resource Keywords	typology, ecological status, lake outlets, calcium precitpitate, naturally acid, groundwater-dominated, reference conditions
EPA/ERTDI/STRIVE Project Code	2013-W-FS-15
EPA/ERTDI/STRIVE Project Theme	Water Quality
Resource Availability:	Public-Open
Limitations on the use of this Resource	Usage of the data is currently restricted and will not be made publicly available from this website until pending publications have been published. You must contact the Point of Contacts listed below directly if you wish to obtain and use the data. In any publication outputs please cite the original producers and owners of this data correctly.
Number of Attached Files (Publicly and Openly Available for Download):	5
Project Start Date	Monday 13th January 2014 (13-01-2014)
Earliest Recorded Date within any attached datasets or digital objects	Wednesday 9th July 2014 (09-07-2014)
Most Recent Recorded Date within any attached datasets or digital objects	Tuesday 26th May 2015 (26-05-2015)
Published on SAFER	Wednesday 27th July 2016 (27-07-2016)
Date of Last Edit	Thursday 28th July 2016 at 12:41:23 (28-07-2016)
Datasets or Files Updated On	Wednesday 27th July 2016 at 17:02:00 (27-07-2016)

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Description of Geographical Characteristics of This Project or Dataset
A total of 40 sites representing the four rare river types were surveyed during this project. For each rare river type five potentially reference condition sites and five impacted sites were surveyed. Sites were chosen based on their underlying geology and landuse and located throughout the country. Naturally acid sites were located in areas with metamorphic/igneous geology while highly calcareous with precipitate and groundwater-dominated sites were located in areas with limestone geology. The majority of the sites surveyed were existing EPA river stations.

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