Groundwater bodies – Meeting – 2016 Report Version

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 assessment unit of the WFD. It makes it possible to define environmental objectives, assess the state of the environment and subsequently verify the achievement of these objectives. Groundwater bodies, based on the work carried out on the BDRHF V1 hydrogeological benchmark, were first identified and demarcated in 2004 and then updated in 2010. They were the subject of a report to the European Commission on the implementation of the WFD on 22 March 2010, then a corrective report in February 2011, taking into account the latest updates. A draft version defined for the 2013 inventory was published in 2015. The version now available on the SANDRE website is in line with the 2016 report.The next version of the Water mass repository (temporary water mass, defined for the State of the Places) is planned for 2019. The layers are distributed in a format conforming to the SANDRE Data Dictionary of the Reference Water Body, version 1.3. The cut-off for water bodies meets the following key principles: Water bodies are delimited on the basis of geological and hydrogeological criteria, The redistribution of water bodies to take into account the effects of anthropogenic pressures must remain limited. The boundaries of water bodies must be stable and durable Like surface water bodies, the delimitation of groundwater bodies is organised from a typology. This typology is largely inspired by that developed for hydrogeological entities defined as part of the revision of the RHF DB. It is based on the geological nature and the hydrodynamic or “large” behavior of aquifer systems (nature, flow rate). It includes two levels of characteristics, principal 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 the water supply of more than 50 people, must be included in a water body. Deep groundwater, unrelated to watercourses and surface ecosystems, in which no sampling takes place and which is not likely to be used for drinking water because of its quality (salinity, temperature, etc.), or for technical-economic reasons (cost of disproportionate abstraction) may not constitute water bodies. Given its size, a body of water may have a certain spatial heterogeneity in terms of both its hydrogeological characteristics and its qualitative and quantitative status. At any point several bodies of water can be superimposed.