EU CHOICE 2-1

The EU aims to help students gain practical experience and develop a high-level perspective on hydrological modeling of watersheds dominated by agricultural activities and affected by climate change. The EU’s approach is based on four key perspectives:

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

2. Characteristics of Agricultural Landscapes and Implications for Modeling,

3. The issue of changing scales,

4. Practice and Critique of Hydrological Modeling.

The EU will provide advanced knowledge on production functions, transfer functions, and global and distributed modeling. It will enable students to independently apply various hydrological models (Green and Ampt, reservoir, Curve Number, unit hydrograph, reservoir cascade, etc.) and to gain a broader perspective on the parameterization, calibration, and validation of hydrological models.

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

Four topics will be covered:

- the Hydrometry component, involving the use of various flow measurement techniques (point-by-point method with an electromagnetic current meter, ADCP, dilution method, float gauging, and radar).

- the soil hydrodynamics component, involving the use of several infiltrometry methods to determine conductivity at saturation, as well as the collection of soil cylinders to determine, after drying, the porosity, dry density, and soil moisture content.

- the Hydrochemistry component, which includes:

• a field component (sampling and analysis using a multiparameter meter and a field spectrophotometer) for physicochemical parameters (temperature, electrical conductivity, pH, dissolved oxygen, TAC, PO4, and NO3, etc.)
• a laboratory portion (analysis and quantification 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.

- the hydrobiology component, which takes into account the presence or absence of certain species—fish, invertebrates, macrophytes (aquatic plants), and diatoms (single-celled algae)—in order to determine specific indices (IPR, IBGN, IBMR, IBD) related to the biological quality of the watercourse.

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