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The objective of the FAME project was to help implement the European Water Framework Directive by developing, evaluating and implementing a fish-based assessment method for the ecological status of rivers.

The method development was based on the Index of Biotic Integrity established in the USA in the early 1980s. The basic principle was to describe fish assemblages by a set of different metrics, whereby these metrics respond to human alterations in a traceable manner.

Two different development approaches were tested: a type-specific spatially based approach and a site-specific approach. This ultimately yielded several methods for ecological status assessment. Statistical tests of the accuracy and consistency of FAME tools, along with comparisons between the FAME methods and existing regional/national methods, demonstrated that the site-specific method is as accurate as all other methods. Since it allows the ecological status to be assessed across Europe with a single, standardized method, it was selected as the final FAME assessment method: the European Fish Index.

FAME was clustered with the EU-funded STAR-Project ("Standardisation of River Classifications: Framework method for calibrating different biological survey results against ecological quality classifications to be developed for the Water Framework Directive").

Download: Summary of the FAME project
Publications (leaflet, poster, presentation, final report).


Contents of the FAME webpage:
The chapter “Main results” provides an introduction to the European Fish Index (EFI), which was selected as the final FAME assessment method. To support the type-specific approach of the WFD, the European Fish Types have been added as an integrative part of the EFI. All tools for application are available here for downloading (software, manual, input database, import files).

“Further results” contains information about several further products of the FAME project: “Basic tools” comprises information and reports on all prerequisites necessary for the method development. FIDES describes the structure and contents of the central “Fish Database of European Streams”. “Spatial methods” provides an overview on several type-specific methods tested and developed in addition to the EFI on the ecoregional as well as the European scale. The performance and consistency of the methods developed during FAME, and 10 existing national methods, were statistically analysed – further information is available in “Method evaluation/method comparison”. The subchapter “Method evaluation/field Testing” describes the testing of the practicability of the FAME sampling standard and the European Fish Index.

FAME was carried out in close cooperation between scientific and applied partners, who contributed to the project by providing data or informing about the status of the WFD implementation in their respective country. One of the ongoing tasks of applied partners is to disseminate the method and to test its applicability in routine monitoring (more details can be found in the report under “Applied Issues”.

 
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