Report with documentation of reconstructed land use around test sites

The establishment of tools for trends analysis in groundwater is essential for the prediction and evaluation of measures taken within context of the Water Framework Directive and the draft Groundwater Directive. This report describes the historic development of contaminant inputs into the groundwater system for the TREND 2 subcatchments. The historic input data are essential to interprete and understand time trends in groundwater, which is the focus of coming deliverables. The emphasis is on diffuse contaminants and includes figures of 1950-present nitrogen inputs fot the Wallonian and Dutch Meuse catchments and the German Schleswig-Holstein catchments. For the Dutch Meuse basin also historical inputs of P, K, S, Ca, Mg, Na, Zn and Cd were estimated. Inputs of the pesticide atrazine were estimated for the small French Brévilles catchment, using interviews with farmers.
On a regional scale, all of these cases show increasing inputs up to about 1985 and a decrease afterwards due to regulations from that time on. Trends in inputs of other diffuse pollutants (cations, heavy metals, pesticides) seem to be correlated to the well established nitrogen inputs. The effects of this increase and subsequent decrease on concentrations in the groundwater system will be analysed in further work within TREND2.