Preliminary assessment of the eutrophication status of selected areas in the Polish sector of the Baltic Sea according to the EU Water Framework Directive

The implementation of the European Union Water Framework Directive required a number of tasks to be fulfilled: classifying the various water bodies into different types, defining reference conditions for each of the types and assessing their ecological quality status – this last is based on biological, hydromorphological and physicochemical quality elements of the ecosystem. The paper presents an attempt to estimate reference values in selected areas of Polish coastal and transitional waters as well as in an open sea area following WFD principles. The preliminary eutrophication assessment showed all the assessed areas to be eutrophication problem areas.