Book of Proceedings of the COST729 Mid-term workshop

Nitrogen Deposition and Natura 2000
Science & practice in determining environmental impacts

This book reviews the evidence from across Europe that confirms nitrogen deposition as a major threat to European biodiversity, especially on the Natura 2000, including sensitive habitats and species listed under the Habitats Directive (92/43/EEC). It documents the information presented and discussed at an international workshop on ‘Natura 2000 and Nitrogen Deposition’, held in Brussels in May 2009, to review new evidence of nitrogen impacts, develop best practices when conducting assessments, and recommend options for consideration in future policy development.

From 11-15 April Edinburgh will host the Final NitroEurope / ESF-NinE / COST729 event. The preparations of this event are ongoing. The latest information about this event can be found at www.nitrogen2011.org

An international workshop in collaboration with experts from the Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)

Registration now closed.

More Details: see website at: http://initrogen.org/144.0.html

Increases in nitrogen (N) deposition in broad areas of Europe and North America, and parts of Asia, over the last 50 years have resulted in losses of plant diversity, shifts in plant communities, changes in ecosystem services and food webs, and other adverse environmental effects. Recent modelling projects increased rates of atmospheric N deposition over the next decades in most regions of the globe. Some parts of the world, such as Europe and Canada, have adopted an effects threshold approach for assessing the impacts of N deposition, known as Critical Loads. N deposition is above or approaching critical loads in parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America. However, shortcomings in several areas currently hamper adoption of the approach and general assessment of nitrogen impacts.

Workshop Goals:

• Assess N deposition estimates at regional to global scales;
• Evaluate N critical loads and their exceedances as suitable tools/indicators;
• Consider options for the assessment of ecosystem responses to N addition in different regions of the world;
• Integrate global scientific knowledge and promote policy and management actions

COST 729 Mid-term Workshop 2009

Nitrogen Deposition and Natura 2000
Science & practice in determining environmental impacts

18-20 May, 2009 Brussels

Goal
To harmonize approaches for determining the impacts of atmospheric nitrogen deposition on Natura 2000 and review the future policy options.

At present there is no common European approach for determining the impacts of nitrogen deposition on individual sites or on conservation status. This provides key challenges for this workshop: to develop best practices in environmental assessment and decision making, and to inform the needs for future policy development. The workshop will compare case studies from different European countries, review the scale of the nitrogen threat to Natura 2000 sites and conservation status, linking the science and decision making at local to European scales.

For more information on the topics and key themes visit the workshop web pages.

The 8th MC meeting will be held in Dourdan (near Paris, France) at 6 November 2008. It will follow the ESF-NinE ENA3 workshop that will be organised at the same location from 4-6 November. Below you will find some general documents about this meeting. Presentation will also be put here, once available. 

The third workshop for the ENA will be organised by Gilles Billen. The exact dates for this workshop are 4-6 November 2008. Place of venue is Dourdan near Paris in France.Focus of this workshop is: Dispersion, budgets and impacts of nitrogen on different scales. More information is available via www.nine-esf.org

In Lisboa - Portugal - the 7th MC meeting of COST729 was very well organised at the University of Lisboa. During this meeting, different national contributions were presented. These presentations are listed below. In the coming weeks, also the other relevant meeting documents will be listed here (e.g. minutes, etc.).

The next COST729 MC meeting is hosted in Portugal at the University of Lisboa. The meeting will take place at the Faculty of Science (Building C2) and will start at 14.00.

Starting at noon of Sept. 12 the 5th COST 729 MC meeting is hosted at the 'Van der Valk Hotel' in Haarlem (The Netherlands). This MC meeting will end at noon of Sept. 14.

The UN/ECE Taskforce on Integrated Assessment Modelling, COST Action 729 and the ESF Programme NinE jointly organised a workshop on 'Integrated Assessment Modelling of Nitrogen', hosted by the International Institute of Applied Systems Analyses (IIASA) located at Laxenburg (Austria). The agenda for the workshop can be found below as attachment, together with a more general description of the workshop.