SIMONA

Title Sediment-quality information, monitoring and assesment system to support transnational cooperation for joint Danube Basin water management
Link to website SIMONA
Programme Interreg Danube Transnational Programme
Project duration 06/2018 – 05/2021
GeoZS role in the project Lead partner
GeoZS contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

CONTENT:

SIMONA is a European project under the Interreg Danube programme, co-financed by the European Union. The SIMONA partnership has 17 full partners (11 ERDF, 4 IPA and 2 ENI) and 12 ASPs, which is strongly balanced and representative of the almost whole geographic Danube River Basin.

EU legislation (2013/39/EU Directive and its previous versions) prescribes sediment quality monitoring and trend analysis, in terms of taking measures to ensure that the Hazardous Substances (HSs) concentrations do not significantly increase in sediments and/or relevant biota. Although the Joint Danube Surveys (JDS 1 and 2) characterizes sediment quality in the Danube several years ago and they concluded that contaminated sediment was an existing problem in the Danube River Basin (DRB), the DTP Countries did not have enough institutional capacity (information, guidelines and methods) to build transnational sediment monitoring network for HS trend assessment. Sediment monitoring is expected to offer cost efficient alternatives to conventional water monitoring for HSs listed in EU WFD CIS Guidance Document No. 25. Therefore, SIMONA project will respond to the current demand for the effective and comparable measurements and assessments of sediment quality in surface waters in the DRB by delivering a ready-to deploy Sediment-quality Information, Monitoring and Assessment System to support transnational cooperation for joint DRB water management. The system is a functional composition of sediment (1) sampling, (2) laboratory analysis, (3) evaluation protocols and (4) SIMONA-tool (online IT application) that are applicable at local and also at strategic level, thus actively contributes to achieving the WFD sediment quality monitoring and chemical status assessment requirements.

The immediate and middle term benefit of the project will be transparent method supported by the SIMONA-tool for sediment quality monitoring that will encourage the cooperation in transnational water management. The project is the long-needed and timely response to the pressing demand of the effective use of sediment quality assessment for the next RBMPs due in 2021.