The Tara Microplastics mission was conducted for 7 months to investigate plastic pollution along nine major rivers in Europe—Thames, Elbe, Rhine, Seine, Loire, Garonne, Ebro, Rhone, and Tiber. An extensive suite of sampling protocols was applied at four to five sites on each river along a salinity gradient from the sea and the outer estuary to downstream and upstream of the first heavily populated city. Biophysicochemical para...

Mediterranean river systems are characterised by more diverse fish assemblages and regional ecological processes compared with the rest of Europe. A data set from Mediterranean France, Iberia and Greece (∼2000 sites) was used to describe the characteristics of fish assemblages, explore their responses to anthropogenic disturbance and analyse the implications for river quality assessment. There was a southwards decline in speci...

The European Union, Water Framework Directive (WFD) requires monitoring of riverine fish fauna. When the WFD came into force in 2000, most of the EU member states did not have fish‐based assessment methods compliant to WFD requirements. Therefore, the objectives of FAME ( http://fame.boku.ac.at ), a project under the fifth R&D Framework Programme of the European Commission were to develop, evaluate and implement a standardised...