STAWA - TOWARDS THE ASSESSMENT OF ECOLOGICAL STATUS OF WATER BODIES IN THE SAVA RIVER BASIN

The main objective of STAWA was to develop sustainable network for collection and exchange of ecological data in order to support basin wide actions for cooperation in the river basin management planning in the Sava River Basin. During the project (terminated in 2016), information related to water management practice within the basin throughout a ten-year period 2005-2015 has been reviewed, with focus on biological data.

The close cooperation between the STAWA with the GLOBAQUA project has been established aiming to employ joint capacities in addressing the problem of prioritization of the pollutants using the same data for modelling and predicting of the pollutants fate. The Sava River Basin is one of the six target basins of the GLOBAQUA project. Two projects jointly organized workshop in Ljubljana on 10-12. February 2016 aiming to connect the people, bring together experts in the fields of water research and management from the region in order to collect cumulative knowledge on the main topics addressed, collect up to date data and discuss methodology issues regarding ecological status of water bodies. The particular cooperation between two projects has been realized in the sphere of joint efforts in data collection, validation and analyses (data on hydromorphology, water quality data, biological data, microbiological data, toxicological and genotoxicological information, data on pressures within the Sava River Basin, socio-economic information), collaboration on stakeholder involvement (specifically during the Ljubljana Workshop), discussion on sampling methodology for large rivers (mostly related to aquatic macroinvertebrate collection), work on the proposal of the design of biological database (as a part of the database on water related information) and connection of institutions and experts on regional (Sava River Basin) and European (GLOBAQUA partners) scale.