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 2023, 20 meetings of the EPNB have been organized, many of which coincided with regular task force meetings. The most recent meeting of the EPNB was organized June 19 in Aarhus, Denmark, jointly with the Task Force on Reactive Nitrogen, June 18 and 19, 2024. Please see the link at the end of this page to access the minutes of these meetings.
EPNB prepared the “Guidance Document on National Nitrogen Budgets”. The document was presented and approved at the 31st meeting of the Executive Body of the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution, versions in French and Russian are available and can be found in the attachments at the bottom of this page.
The detailed provisions of creating N budgets for seven out of eight pools defined in the GD (and a general overview on definitions and principles) have now been provided by EPNB. These Annexes to the GD are now available for public review. Please download and use the annexes provided as one file at the bottom of this page (~7 MB file size). This file version includes all comments received by September 21, 2016, and now also includes the Energy Annex that has been made available in September 2019. Merely the Waste Annex is missing from the compendium.
Based on extensive user feedback, a revision and completion of the guidance docoment has been commissioned. This revision and the reviewer feedback was discussed at the recent EPNB-22 in Dessau, Germany, November 5-6, 2024. Minutes of that meeting are available, also containing the action notes of the author team to the revised Annexes. Presentations both of the author team and of national experts on their recent activities are hosted by Umweltbundesamt, Germany, at this external web site. That web site also contains a draft version of the updated Annexes to the GD, and a data template (Excel spreadsheet) for reporting of national nitrogen budgets. Anyone interested to establish such budgets is recommended to consult this new draft version or to wait for the final version to be available at the EPNB web site in February 2025. Please feel free to contact the EPNB co-chairs (Wilfried Winiwarter, winiwarter(at)iiasa.ac.at, and Markus Geupel, markus.geupel(at)uba.de)
EPNB sends updates on their activities in an e-mail newsletter, in addition to material posted here (see EPNB Newsletter April '21). If you wish to become involved, please contact the co-chairs via e-mail. Information on past and current activities, e.g. the minutes of all previous EPNB meetings will soon be available from this site.