A review of the achievements of the EU project ‘QUASIMEME’ 1993–1996

The EU project ‘QUASIMEME’ was established to provide comprehensive knowledge of the quality of chemical measurements made in marine monitoring programmes, to determine the underlying causes of poor inter-laboratory agreement for these measurements and to provide stepwise improvement. The quality of analytical performance of all laboratories in the scheme has been established. During the project, 32 laboratories have improved their performance, 18 were consistently good, 16 were consistently poor and a further 10 have declined in performance. Overall, 34 of the 76 laboratories currently produce data which have >80% of values being satisfactory. Determinands and/or matrices which still present problems are low levels of ammonia in seawater, lead in biota, CB 28, CB 105 and CB 156 and some of the organochlorine pesticides.