EPNB

Expert Panel on Nitrogen Budgets

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. The first specifically devoted meeting of the Expert Panel was organized in Dourdan (Paris), November 5, 2008. The second and third meetings were organized next to the general TFRN meetings on April 27, 2009, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, on May 11, 2010, in Prague. EPNB-4 was held in Paris, France on October 29th, 2010 and EPNB-5 alongside the Nitrogen and Global Change Conference in Edinburgh, in April 2011.

Adjacent to the upcoming TFRN meeting, the next EPNB meeting will be held in St. Petersburg, Russia, March 2. EPNB participants please register with the main TFRN meeting - then organizers can help you handle the visa requirements (deadline for application: Jan 20).

Venue: Park Inn Pulkovskaya Hotel, meeting starts March 2, 9:00 a.m.

Preliminary agenda:

  1. Dynamic Tool National N budgets (Jürg Heldstab and Adrian Leip)
  2. N as a key environmental indicator (OECD) - Wilfried Winiwarter reporting back from interactions with OECD
  3. Eurostat TF on Gross Nutrient Balances (Anne Miek Kremer) 
  4. Eurostat TF on Fertilizer Statistics & Working Group on Agro Environmental Indicators (Alessandra De Marco and Anne Miek Kremer)
  5. Proposed memorandum of understanding between EUROSTAT and TFRN or UNECE: EPNB's position (Wilfried Winiwarter and Anne Miek Kremer)
  6. N budget guidance document: status and further development (discussion facilitated by Wilfried Winiwarter)
  7. National N budgets: new developments (AT: Barbara Amon and Wilfried Winiwarter; ...)
  8. AOB

Minutes and documents from previous meetings can be found at the links below.

If you have information which may contribute to the aim of the expert panel, or if you are interested in the further development of this concept, please contact Wilfried Winiwarter (winiwarter<at>iiasa.ac.at) or Albert Bleeker (a.bleeker<at>ecn.nl), current co-chairs of the expert panel.

The EPNB submitted a guidance document on calculating nitrogen budgets to WGSR-49, this can be downloaded here. Further activities have been reported by Switzerland - a meeting report on "Dynamic Tool National N budgets" has been prepared and is available for download below (for logged-in users only).