The aim of this project was to develop methodologies which allowed: i) to provide predictive tools that can be easily applied to define the most effective policies 
and institutional arrangements for resource management; ii) to apply the most effective and innovative techniques (mainly goal function and artificial 
neural networks) to identify problems in ecosystem functioning, resulting in ecosystem degradation from human impact, and to model relevant biological 
resources; iii) to fully exploit existing information, reducing the amount of field work (that is both expensive and time consuming) that is needed in order 
to assess freshwater ecosystems health; iv) to explore specific actions to be taken for restoration of ecosystem integrity; and v) to promote collaboration 
among scientists of different interested countries and research fields, encouraging collaboration and dissemination of results and techniques. 
            

The goal of the PAEQANN project was to develop general methodologies, based on advanced modelling techniques, for predicting structure and diversity of key 
aquatic communities under   
natural and man-made disturbances. This allowed the detection of the significance of various environmental variables that structure these aquatic communities. 
These have been shown to   
reveal predictable changes due to natural variability and human disturbances. Natural conditions are described as undisturbed by human activities and 
man-made disturbances are   
defined as various pollutants, discharge regulation, etc.   
Such an approach to the analysis of aquatic communities made possible:   
• to set up robust and sensitive ecosystem evaluation procedures that will work across a large range of running water ecosystems throughout Europe,   
firstly, to point out the cause and effect relationships between environmental conditions (physical, chemical, due to management actions) and certain 
relevant   
aquatic communities (diatoms, macroinvertebrates, and fish)   
 and then, to predict biocenosis structure in disturbed ecosystems, taking into account all the relevant ecological variables   
• to test ecosystem sensitivity to disturbance   
• to explore specific actions to be taken for restoration of ecosystem integrity   
   
The achieved objectives have been:   
 i) setting up a standardised methodological approach (we have defined a set of technical procedures which will be used in a common framework to analyse or 
to predict community structure of studied ecosystems; each reference site is sampled in a standardised way and this will allow to compare the different sites 
for regional conservation priorities); ii) linking the environmental characteristics and the community structure at each reference site by using a defined 
set of parameters and a combination of target groups representing the main functional levels of the ecosystems (rapid assessment procedures will be implemented 
on these hypotheses that regulative and functional factors, the resources describe ecosystem functioning in a unifying way); iii) evaluating at a functional 
level the sensitivity of the studied ecosystems and their response to disturbance through implementation of sensitivity indices and modelling (the main 
threats on living communities and on local endangered species will be identified as we shall build predictive models of community structure for a set of critical 
habitats); and iv) investigating the effects of human impacts on the functioning of the ecosystem, i.e. on the composition and change in structural and functional 
organism groups in comparison to nearby natural reference conditions. Special attention was directed to summarising ecosystem functioning by exploring 
the chance of community restoration in selected sites submitted to the most common types of disturbance. 
            

The goal of the PAEQANN project was to develop general methodologies, based on advanced modelling techniques, for predicting structure and diversity of key 
aquatic communities under   
natural and man-made disturbances.   
   
The available products are:   
   
- A set of tools for water management and water policies was developed in order to allow assessing ecological quality and perturbations of stream ecosystems. 
The software is available on the Paequann web-page (Ready for Application Level).   
   
- A review is available listing all the existing biological   
methods of river quality assessment with diatoms, macroinvertebrates, fishes, and of the predictive models in order to have a good vision of the scientific 
state of art.   
   
- A report concerning existing and new field data results stored in the Paequann database.   
   
- A review on classical statistical models, artificial neural networks and dynamic models.   
   
- A report on Cross Stream Comparision: Experiences with model   
performances within the PAEQANN project   
   
- Publication of dynamic model results   
   
- Publication of ANN (Artificial Neural Network) model results   
   
- Report on the methods used in the project   
   
- A review of tools (biological- , chemical- , holistic indicators) considered in the Paequann project.   
   
- Report on the test results of the tools.   
Furthermore a large publication list can be accessed on the project web page.