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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