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Besides producing the European Fish Index and the European
Fish Types as the main output of the FAME project, the project yielded
further results. As a prerequisite for the method development, several
basic concepts and tools were defined
and agreed, including:
- a concept for the definition of river types,
- a concept for the identification of reference
conditions,
- a concept for the pre-classification of sites
based on environmental variables,
- classification of fish species occurring in FAME
countries,
- selection and calculation of potential metrics,
- standardisation of a sampling procedure based
on the CEN standard “Fishing with Electricity” (EN
14011).
The principles agreed upon in the “Basic tools” section
were the basis for the FAME central
database FIDES.
Apart from the site-specific approach, which enabled the development
of the final FAME assessment method (the European Fish Index EFI),
spatially based
type-specific methods were developed on the ecoregional
as well as on the European level.
All fish-based assessment methods developed during the FAME project
and 9 existing methods were compared in terms of accuracy and consistency.
Moreover the practicability of the standardized sampling procedure
and the European Fish index was tested (see Method
evaluation).
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