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 approved at the 45th session of the EB in December 2025 (official meeting document ECE/EB.AIR/WG.5/2025/3, to be replaced here by the official version in three UNECE languages). 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 as well as for Sweden have 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. The EB at its meeting in December 2025 also endorsed this Call-for-data and included it to the work plan for 2026/27.
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. EPNB will be holding an Expert Panel meeting, EPNB-23, as a videoconference on January 28, 2026 (starting at 9 a.m. CET). Expert panel members will receive updates. Please register (by e-mail to the EPNB co-chairs by January 23), as invitation links will be sent to registered participants only.
Draft agenda (January 28, 9 a.m. - 4 p.m., including one hour break):
- Welcome and updates from TFRN and EB (Markus Geupel and Wilfried Winiwarter)
- Country reports
- New developments on the Japanese nitrogen budget (Kazuya Nishina, NIES)
- Where does Sweden’s nitrogen go? Building a comprehensive national nitrogen budget (Filip Moldan, IVL) - Methodological and institutional developments
- Eurostat’s activities on N budgets (Paulo Braz, Eurostat)
- Updates on the visualization tool (Audric Vigier, CEH) - Implementing NNBs in European countries (all participants)
- Tour de table: status of interest in different countries
- Content of call for data (timelines, submission, evaluation)
- Support mechanisms: training program
- Support mechanisms: peer-2-peer network - AOB