Establishment of a spatially referenced information system in the context of the European Water Framework Directive

Abstract

To answer the main objective of the European Water Framework Directive (WFD), namely the "good ecological status" of water bodies, a project of aquatic ecosystem regionalization was initiated. The determination of hydro-ecoregions (HER), which constitute the adopted frame for water bodies typology, required the implementation of a dedicated geographical information system (GIS). This article presents the GIS creation, the analysis of geographical information to delimit the HER and an example of data use to characterize the anthropic pressures.