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River discharges and loads are essential inputs to coastal seas, and thus for coastal seas modelling, and their properties are the result of all activities and policies carried inland. For these reasons main rivers were object of intense monitoring programs having been generated some important amount of historical data. Due to the decline in the Portuguese hydrometric network and in order to quantify and forecast surface water streamflow and nutrients to coastal areas, the MOHID Land model was applied to the Western Iberia Region with a 2 km horizontal resolution and to the Iberian Peninsula with 10 km horizontal resolution. The domains were populated with land use and soil properties and forced with existing meteorological models. This approach also permits to understand how the flows and loads are generated and to forecast their values which are of utmost importance to perform coastal ocean and estuarine forecasts. The final purpose of the implementation is to obtain fresh water quantity and quality that could be used to support management decisions in the watershed, reservoirs and also to estuaries and coastal areas. A process oriented model as MOHID Land is essential to perform this type of simulations, as the model is independent of the number of river catchments. In this work, the Mohid Land model equations and parameterisations were described and an innovative methodology for watershed modelling is presented and validated for a large international river, the Tagus River, and the largest national river of Portugal, the Mondego River. Precipitation, streamflow and nutrients modelling results for these two rivers were compared with observations near their coastal outlet in order to evaluate the model capacity to represent the main watershed trends. Finally, an annual budget of fresh water and nutrient transported by the main twenty five rivers discharging in the Portuguese coast is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phytoplankton are crucial to marine ecosystem functioning and are important indicators of environmental change. Phytoplankton data are also essential for informing management and policy, particularly in supporting the new generation of marine legislative drivers, which take a holistic ecosystem approach to management. The Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) seeks to achieve Good Environmental Status (GES) of European seas through the implementation of such a management approach. This is a regional scale directive which recognises the importance of plankton communities in marine ecosystems; plankton data at the appropriate spatial, temporal and taxonomic scales are therefore required for implementation. The Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) survey is a multidecadal, North Atlantic–basin scale programme which routinely records approximately 300 phytoplankton taxa. Because of these attributes, the survey plays a key role in the implementation of the MSFD and the assessment of GES in the Northeast Atlantic region. This paper addresses the role of the CPR's phytoplankton time-series in delivering GES through the development and informing of MSFD indicators, the setting of targets against a background of climate change and the provision of supporting information used to interpret change in non-plankton indicators. We also discuss CPR data in the context of other phytoplankton data types that may contribute to GES, as well as explore future possibilities for the use of new and innovative applications of CPR phytoplankton datasets in delivering GES. Efforts must be made to preserve long-term time series, such as the CPR, which supply vital ecological information used to informed evidence-based environmental policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]