River Basin Visions: Tools and Approaches from Yesterday to Tomorrow

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to provide a critical assessment of the approaches and production of tools within the PIREN-Seine programme over the past 30 years, as well as their use for river basin management and river quality improvement, and to analyse the challenges for the future. Three types of tools used in the PIREN-Seine programme are presented: metrology and fieldwork; model construction, simulation and their use in scenarios; and participatory science tools. These tools have been gradually built by the PIREN-Seine researchers and often developed together with the partners of the research programme, the main managers of the Seine River basin. Three issues raised by scientists and their partners are identified: (1) for metrology, how it has been improved to measure the state of waterbodies and to avoid their degradation; (2) for models, what they currently do and do not do and how they share common knowledge with practitioners; and (3) the place of researchers in the use of participatory devices in territories and their view of the effects of these tools to improve the quality of rivers and aquifers.

Trajectories of the Seine River Basin

“…These trajectories represent simplified expressions of our understanding at a given stage of (1) the spatial description of the system state and its functioning, (2) its temporal evolution in the longue durée, (3) the relationships between river/water actors, and (4) the evolving position of river basins within the Earth system, particularly within the new Anthropocene concept [42,49]. Trajectories bridge the gap between natural scientists and social scientists and make some results more readily available to our partners and to the public [50]. When possible, the usage of numerical models leads to quantitative results that help to define trajectories.…”

“…They have been continuously improved, by integrating new processes, new interactions with the basin society, and refining the space or time resolution. These models can be considered as general tools that encapsulate most of the knowledge gained by the programme at a given stage (see [50]).…”

“…Some of the model tools that have been adapted to the territorial conditions can be used to explore local-scale scenarios (e.g. for conflicting river uses, restoration of fish migration, reshaping the agricultural waterscape) (see examples in [50]). At the scale of the whole basin, other scenarios are being developed between scientists and partners, exploring possible future perspectives, particularly in terms of sanitation, agriculture, water demand, and flood security demand (future water storage) [32,64,81,82].…”

“…Other experimental sites include mid-order streams (3 and 4), such as the Grand Morin River (III on Fig. 1), for which social experiments among river users have been undertaken [50,90], and the Orge River, a suburban river in the Paris region with a high population density, where many analyses of legacy and emerging contaminants have been carried out (IV in Fig. 1) [85].…”

“…An original feature of the PIREN-Seine programme was to take into account the whole continuum from small streams to the Seine mouth since the outset of the programme [32,41,46,66]. The PIREN-Seine has gradually developed numerous models [50]. These are schematized in Fig.…”