ARPEGES, a method to assess the risk of surface waters contamination by pesticides at the national scale

Arpeges is an innovating and coherent method to assess the potential surface water’s contamination by pesticides at the national scale. In France, it was implemented at Water Framework Directive water bodies’ scale. The objectives are to identify of vulnerable zones and to determinate the main risk factors implied in pollution transfer according to the considered zones. Actually, this method allows a better understanding and a ranking of pollution’s causes considering three essential aspects of the contamination: uses, environmental vulnerability to pesticides pollution and substances properties. The method is mostly based on transfer processes. In order to take into account the seasonal temporal variability, analyses are separately carried on winter and summer, and both acute and chronic approaches of the risk are considered. The segregation between these two risks is built on the different processes transfer times to reach surface waters. 18 relevant variables describing pesticides transfer are chosen (infiltration, pedology, drainage, climate, buffer zones…); they are aggregated according to up to date expert knowledge thanks to a Bayesian network to obtain pesticides contamination. This tool allows associating an uncertainty factor to each result and contributing to increase the adaptability of the method. Intermediary results as environmental vulnerabilities are relevant to identify the main causes of transfer.