The Expert Panel on Nitrogen Budgets (EPNB) provides expert guidance to the Task Force on Reactive Nitrogen in providing mass-consistent information of the fate of nitrogen in the environment. It was initiated at the first meeting of the Task Force in Wageningen, Netherlands, in June 2008 as an ad-hoc expert panel. Between 2008 and 2024, 22 meetings of the EPNB have been organized, many of which coincided with regular task force meetings. The most recent EPNB meeting was organized November 5-6, 2024, in Dessau, Germany. Minutes of that meeting are available as a pdf file at the end of this page, including action notes. Presentations and further material are hosted by the German Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt), at this external web site.
EPNB prepared the “Guidance Document on National Nitrogen Budgets”. The document was presented and approved at the 31st session of the Executive Body of the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution in 2013. An update has been endorsed by the WGSR and has now been submitted for approval to the 45th session of the EB (official document ECE/EB.AIR/WG.5/2025/3) to be held in December 2025. Based on extensive user feedback from previous versions, also the Annexes to the Guidance Document have been revised so that the Guidance Document and its Annexes (the complete user guidance) are now fully consistent.
The Annexes, produced under contract for the German Environment Agency, are now available as a report. The complete and detailed guidance also contains a template for reporting NNBs (Excel template including some simple vizualization tools) and a template to export data to display Nr flows using the STAN software (as a zip-file, for details please consult the Annexes to the GD; software is available for free provided by TU Vienna). All documents and files are available for download here and are supported by a Summary for Policy Makers (available at the bottom of this page).
With the approach also scientifically backed-up (the methodology and the implementaton for Austria have both been published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research Letters), the EPNB chairs have introduced recent progress made to the National Delegates to the LRTAP Convention at a meeting in Helsingor, Denmark, Oct 20-23, 2025, requesting a voluntary Call-for-data to be issued in order to extend experience and database of national nitrogen budgets. This Call-for-data is also up for decision of the upcoming session of the EB in December 2025.
Anyone interested to establish national nitrogen budgets is recommended to consult the material presented or referred to at this page. Please feel free to contact the EPNB co-chairs (Wilfried Winiwarter, winiwarter(at)iiasa.ac.at, and Markus Geupel, markus.geupel(at)uba.de) to get involved in the further activities of the Expert Panel. In order to prepare for an upcoming Call-for-data, EPNB is planning for an Expert Panel meeting, EPNB-23, to be held January 28, 2026 (probably as a virtual event). Expert panel members will receive updates and invitations via the EPNB e-mail list.