This report aims at assessing the environmental state of major rivers in the European Environment Agency (EEA) area and relating water quality variables to dominant human activities in river catchments. The report is based on a generally good quality data set of water quality variables while the information about human activities is more sparse and heterogeneous. This lack of information on human activities prevents a full assessment of the relationship between water quality variables and human activities. The assessment could have benefited from more detailed information about land-use characteristics (arable land, use of fertilizers, etc.) in the river catchments and information about the sources of pollutants (eg. sewage treatment plants) would have been valuable.