A groundwater body is a separate volume of groundwater within one or more aquifers, constituting the elemental division of aquatic environments intended to be the WFD assessment unit. It makes it possible to define environmental objectives, to assess the state of the environment and subsequently to verify the achievement of these objectives.
Groundwater bodies, based on the work carried out on the BDRHF V1 hydrogeological repository, were first identified and demarcated in 2004 and were updated in 2010. They were the subject of the report to the European Commission on the implementation of the WFD on 22 March 2010, followed by a corrective report in February 2011, taking into account the latest updates. A provisional version defined for the 2013 inventory was published in 2015.
The version now released on the SANDRE website is in line with the 2016 report. The next version of the Water Mass (provisional water bodies, defined for the State of Places) is planned for 2019.
The layers are distributed in a format consistent with the SANDRE data dictionary of the Water Mass Reference, version 1.3.
The splitting used for water bodies meets the following main principles:
Water bodies are delimited on the basis of geological and hydrogeological criteria,
The redividing of water bodies to take account of the effects of anthropogenic pressures must remain limited.
Water body limits must be stable and sustainable
Like surface water bodies, the delimitation of groundwater bodies is organised from a typology. This typology is largely inspired by the one developed for the hydrogeological entities defined as part of the revision of the RHF BD. It is based on the geological nature and hydrodynamic behavior or “big” operation of aquifer systems (nature, flow velocity). It includes two levels of characteristics, main and secondary.
Water bodies can have exchanges between them.
All Potable Water Supply Captures, providing more than 10 m³/day of drinking water or used for water supply to more than 50 people, must be included in a water body.
Deep groundwater, unrelated to rivers and surface ecosystems, in which no sampling takes place and which are not likely to be used for drinking water due to their quality (salinity, temperature, etc.), or for technical and economic reasons (disproportionate cost of capture) may not constitute bodies of water.
Given its size, a body of water may present a certain spatial heterogeneity both in terms of its hydrogeological characteristics and its qualitative and quantitative state.
At any point several bodies of water can overlap.
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