A national macroinvertebrate dataset collected for the biomonitoring of Ireland's river network, 2007-2018

Abstract

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Ireland is responsible for the ecological monitoring and assessment of 37 hydrometric areas covering 46 river catchments and over 13,000 km of river channel nationwide. The national river monitoring program commenced in 1971 and has developed further since 2007 into the National Rivers Water Framework Directive (WFD) Monitoring Program following the implementation of the WFD across the European Union. The monitoring program is designed to obtain sufficiently representative information to assess ecological quality for each water body assessed. Consequently, macroinvertebrate data have been collected at over 2,900 river survey stations on a minimum 3-year cycle to fulfil these requirements. While the EPA has collected these data for water quality assessments we recognize that the data have value beyond this one purpose. We provide a summary of how these 10,987 data records, covering the years 2007 to 2018, have been collected and used to deepen understanding of water quality, biodiversity and general ecological health of Ireland's river network.

Fig. 1

(a) Map of hydrometric areas (HA) in the dataset and (b) locations of all river biomonitoring stations 2007–2018 in Ireland. Both maps created using EPA data. See Table 5 for more details.

Fig. 2

National trends in macroinvertebrate quality of water bodies using the Q-value rating system calculated using the data collected by the EPA between 2007 and 2018. Number in parentheses on y-axis is total number of water bodies assessed. The color legend reflects ecological conditions as described in Table 1. Adapted from O’Boyle et al..