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Environmental information systems
WISE Marine aims to ensure timely and easy access to all Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) data reported digitally by EU Member States. It also provides assessment products—such as expert dashboards, compliance and assessment reports —that track the status and progress toward achieving Good Environmental Status (GES) in Europe’s seas.
Various resources, including tools, reports, and dashboards, are available within different sections of WISE Marine. This page aggregates these resources to help end users—particularly scientists and policymakers—quickly find relevant information related to the MSFD and its implementation.
This WISE Marine section makes available data and metadata of spatial datasets related with the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) implementation, such as the marine regions and subregions, the national marine waters and the Marine Reporting Unit (MRU) provided by Member States and that represent the marine assessment areas requested by the Directive and linked to its Articles. The section offers also other spatial datasets, elaborated by the European Environment Agency (EEA) and the European Topic Centre (ETC) for statistical purposes and based on the above MSFD data.
The MSFD data explorer offers a series of interfaces to explore and filter all the data reported under the different MSFD Articles reported by Member States from 2012 up to the present date. The data is also available for download.
The Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) has several reporting obligations through which the EU Member States have to inform the European Commission on the implementation of different Articles of the Directive. The data presented here were submitted by Countries via the Central Data Repository of the Eionet portal or via Reportnet 3, quality controlled and imported into a central database hosted by the European Environment Agency and later reused for analysis and assessment purposes.
This section offers a series of dashboards, oriented primarily to an expert audience, presenting data reported by Member States as required for the implementation of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). In particular, results on the degree to which countries achieve Good Environmental Status (GES) are presented in a dynamic format, allowing users to explore, use and download data and figures in a variety of ways. The data have been reported in a standardised format and are displayed as presented by the Member States, without further processing.
EU Member States have the obligation to inform the European Commission on the implementation of the different phases of the MSFD cycle: initial assessment, good environmental status (GES definition), establishement of environmental targets, set up of monitoring programmes and implementattion of programmes of measures. On the basis of the information received, the European Commission evaluates the implementation of the MSFD at national level (compliance assessment), and its level of coherence within the different marine regions or subregions and across the Union. This assessment serves also for the preparation of reports to the European Parliament, Council of Ministers, and the public, and to show the progress towards achieving GES across Europe’s seas.