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