OPTION 2

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The EU aims to support students in gaining practical experience and a high-level perspective on hydrological modeling of watersheds dominated by agricultural activities and subject to climate change. The EU's approach is based on four key points:

1. Watershed hydrology and its place in the history of science,

2. Specific features of agricultural landscapes and implications for modeling,

3. Issues surrounding scale change,

4. Practice and critique of hydrological modeling.

The EU will provide advanced knowledge on production functions, transfer functions, global and distributed modeling. It will guide students toward the independent use of various hydrological models (Green and Ampt, reservoir, Curve Number, unit hydrograph, cascade of reservoirs, etc.) and toward taking a step back to consider the parameterization, calibration, and validation of hydrological models.

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The status of a watercourse within the meaning of the WFD comprises two aspects: chemical status and ecological status. To define ecological status, several parameters must be taken into account, including parameters related to the volume of water (measured by flow rate) in the watercourse. In this course, students will be required to carry out field or laboratory measurements to determine some of the key parameters used in determining the status of a watercourse or more generally used in hydrological studies (floods, resource assessment, etc.).

Four topics will be addressed:

- Hydrometry, using various gauging techniques (point-by-point method with electromagnetic current meter, ADCP, dilution method, float gauging, radar).

- Soil hydrodynamics, using several infiltration methods to determine saturation conductivity, and soil cylinder sampling to determine porosity, dry density, and soil water content after drying.

- Hydrochemistry, including:

• fieldwork (sampling and analysis using a multiparameter meter and a field spectrophotometer) for physical and chemical parameters (temperature, electrical conductivity, pH, dissolved oxygen, TAC, PO4, and NO3, etc.)
• a laboratory component (analysis and quantification of the presence of 4-tert-octylphenol in a surface water sample, using gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (GC-MS/MS)) to determine the presence of trace amounts of emerging contaminants from the alkylphenol ethoxylate (APEO) family, compounds found in products such as detergents, emulsifiers, and solubilizers.

- Hydrobiology, taking into account the presence or absence of certain species: fish, invertebrates, macrophytes (aquatic plants), and diatoms (unicellular algae), in order to determine specific indices (IPR, IBGN, IBMR, IBD) relating to the biological quality of the watercourse.

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This EU focuses on natural mineral waters and thermal waters, whose specific characteristics make them unique resources in terms of exploitation, management, and protection of their deposits. Students will thus be trained in the specific technical and regulatory/health aspects governing the exploitation of these resources, in particular through presentations by professionals in the sector and a visit to an exploitation site. They will also learn about the management and protection of this type of aquifer so that they can propose study protocols to be implemented in situ to characterize and protect these resources and thus acquire hydrogeological expertise for this type of aquifer.

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This course unit should enable students to acquire the skills necessary for collecting hydrometric data (in the broad sense) in the field and to know how to apply them to different types of case studies, in order to carry out an engineering/research project in hydrogeology.

This EU takes place in two stages:

• A first week spent entirely in the field in the Pyrénées-Orientales department;
• A second week spent indoors, reviewing, analyzing, and interpreting the data collected in the field.

During the^first week, the first three days are devoted to acquiring various technical skills in hydrometry (in the broad sense) in situ, so that students can then take charge during the last two days, when they will work on a case study to be solved by project group. They will then be divided between two experimental sites where the projects will be carried out. The topics will be presented in more detail at the beginning of the course so that the pre-defined groups can propose an experimental protocol to be carried out in situ, enabling them to solve their problem. The supervisory team will validate the proposed protocols the day before the experiments begin.

During the^second week, students will analyze the data they have collected on their field project and divide up the various analyses and interpretations of this data in order to produce a presentation and report integrating and summarizing all these results, which will be used to evaluate their work.

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