Trends of environmental information systems in the context of the European Water Framework Directive Thomas Usla¨nder * Fraunhofer IITB, Fraunhoferstr. 1, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany Received 12 January 2004; received in revised form 10 June 2004; accepted 17 September 2004 Available online 20 July 2005 Abstract In Europe, the development of Environmental Information Systems for the water domain is heavily influenced by the need to support the processes of the European Water Framework Directive (WFD). The aim of the WFD is to ensure that all European waters, these being groundwater, surface or coastal waters, are protected according to a common standard. While the WFD itself does only include concrete information technology (IT) recommendations on a very high-level of data exchange, regional and/or national environmental agencies build or adapt their information systems according to their specific requirements in order to deliver the results for the first WFD reporting phase on time. Moreover, as the WFD requires a water management policy centered on natural river basin districts instead of administrative and political regions, the agencies have to co-ordinate their work, possibly across national borders. On this background, the present article analyses existing IT recommendations for the WFD implementation strategy and motivates the need to develop an IT Framework Architecture that comprises different views such as an organisational, a process, a data and a functional view. After having presented representative functions of operational water body information systems for the thematic and the co-operation layer, the article concludes with a summary of future IT developments that are required to efficiently support the WFD implementation. Ó 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Environmental information systems; Water Framework Directive; EIS; WFD; GML; INSPIRE; GMES; Java; OGC 1. Introduction 1.1. The European Water Framework Directive The Water Framework Directive (WFD) is widely recognised as one of the most ambitious and compre- hensive pieces of European environmental legislation to date (European Commission, 2000). Its aim is to ensure that all European waters are protected according to a common standard. The WFD has two key compo- nents: -a system of management of the natural water environment based on natural river basin districts (instead of administrative and political regions); and - the introduction of co-ordinated ‘‘programmes of measures’’ with the ultimate objective of achieving (at least) ‘‘good status’’ for most of the European rivers, coastal waters and underground waters by 2015. River basin management according to the WFD is a multi-step process. The first step, being concluded by 2004, is to assess the ecological status of rivers, lakes and groundwater in each river basin district. For ground- water, the key factors are chemical contamination and water quantity, for surface water it is the quality of the * Tel.: C49 7216091480; fax: C49 7216091413. E-mail address: uslaender@iitb.fraunhofer.de 1364-8152/$ - see front matter Ó 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.envsoft.2004.09.029 Environmental Modelling & Software 20 (2005) 1532e1542 www.elsevier.com/locate/envsoft