Behovsanalys och förslag till framtida verksamhet i våtmarksövervakningen: en delutredning inom revisionen av Naturvårdsverkets miljöövervakningsprogram Våtmarker

In 2016 the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency conducts a revision of the environmental monitoring program focusing on wetlands with the overall objective to evaluate the design and implementation of the current program and how it work against the background of the most important stakeholders. This report is one of two sub-reports within the revision of the program. The purpose of this report is to produce data for the overall revision, focusing on describing the society's need for wetland data and how these can best be met. The objectives of the report are to answer the overall questions: Is the right information produced in the program? Are the results and data from the program area used by the society? How to increase the use of the produced data? Can the program be more efficient and streamlined? This report summarizes existing environmental monitoring in wetlands. The needs of the society of environmental monitoring data from the wetlands and how this data is used today is summarized in the report based on interviews with twelve county administrative boards, the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, the Swedish Board of Agriculture, Forestry Board, the Sami Parliament, two representatives of from two different municipalities and a group of other stakeholders that potentially use data from environmental monitoring in wetlands summarizes the report which needs society of environmental monitoring data from the wetlands and how this data is used today. One chapter focuses specifically on the needs of wetland data for national and international reporting. It is mainly different governmental authorities i.e. decision makers at different levels, EU, national and regional level that use monitoring data on wetland in order to design, implement and evaluate strategies related to long-term sustainable management of wetland ecosystem services and biodiversity. Data from the national environmental programs NFI, NILS and THUF are used in regional, national and international reporting on wetland status and change. Monitoring data on wetlands is for instance used to evaluate the Swedish environmental objectives "Thriving Wetlands" and "A Rich Diversity of Plant and Animal life". Comprehensive data from the wetland satellite surveillance (SBÖ) form a large part of the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency's environmental “monitoring program Wetlands”, which is mainly used by county administrative boards as a basis for prioritization of measures/restorations and for follow-up in protected areas, but also for following up regional environmental objectives. There are also possibilities to, at least partially, evaluate short and long term effects of different driving forces based on environmental monitoring data in combination with auxiliary data. Coordination of field work, sampled parameters and analysis among the environmental monitoring programs is a key to an effective environmental monitoring of wetlands. Further, the national monitoring programs can stand for continuity and competence when developing new supplementary monitoring of wetland making it possible to design an efficient inventory. The authorities are largely asking for analyzes, where the results are put in a larger context. One way to streamline this is that county boards etc. to a larger extent collaborate and order these analyses they need in dialogue with the environmental monitoring programs. There are great opportunities to make more efficient use of already collected data from different monitoring programs. Use of model assisted estimation would for instance make it possible to present reliable results over smaller areas than before. Model-based maps could be produced that can be used for decision making, future scenarios and cause analysis. Further, in particular, the county administrative board’s needs object-based data of specific wetland object for their decision making. For this, large scale data is required in the form of satellite-based wetland monitoring, laser data and/or photogrammetric data.