The objective of the workshop is to compare the nitrogen budget of well documented large regional watersheds (>5000 km²) from Europe and other parts of the world, differing in their rate of NANI and in their climatic/ hydrological regimes.  For each of these systems, NANI will be estimated at the basin scale from available measurements or statistical sources, as well as landscape storage or denitrification, in-stream retention, riverine export and food and feed export. When possible, local, country based and/or global data bases will be used comparatively in order to establish the NANI budgets.

Prior to the meeting, participants are expected to gather their watershed data bases according to a common format, in order to achieve comparisons (e.g. inter-basin, inter-countries, inter-climatic zone, etc.) under a standardized procedure.