An approach for spatializing the agricultural activities (RA-SPACE) with application to the calculation of a pesticide indicator at the Adour-Garonne district level in the Water Framework Directive implementation context

Abstract

In the field of agri-environment, decision makers have to face a lack of operational methods useful for the implementation of public policies. The RA-SPACE method presented in this paper aims to provide a solution for transferring data from an administrative level to an environmental one and to describe the agricultural activities at the scale of the hydrographic unit (HU), in the context of the application of the Water Framework Directive (WFD). It is based on a GIS approach and on a statistical model and uses aggregation and breaking up tools, so that all the variables of the RA (Agricultural Census) would be recovered at the hydrological unit scale. This method has been applied to the calculation of a spatialised pesticide indicator at the Adour-Garonne district scale. The sensitive areas for pesticide pressure defined in this way were chosen by the River Basin Agency for the diagnosis phase of the implementation of the WFD.