EIS Pesticides: An environmental information system to characterize agricultural activities and calculate agro-environmental indicators at embedded watershed scales

The French “Ecophyto 2018” program calls for a 50% reduction in pesticide use. Local authorities are required to design cost-effective measures to minimize the impact of farmers’ pesticides on water resources. A successful implementation of these new measures can only be achieved through a better understanding of the interactions between water, land use and the environment. One way of doing this is to calculate pesticide pressure and agro-environmental indicators (AEIs). However, this approach requires an effective information system that can process both the characteristics of the river basin and the agricultural activities using at least two embedded scales: the scale of the small agricultural catchment for action by farmers and the scale of a larger watershed for public decision making. To this end, an environmental information system (EIS Pesticide) for pesticide issues was created using spatial data warehouse technology. This system allowed qualifying agricultural activities along with river basin characteristics. Specific spatial objects were designed to characterize practices at the relevant scales. The axes of analysis allowed providing results at different levels of integration, for different dimensions e.g. time, sprayed surface area, or pesticide type. The system was tested using datasets collected in the Charente watershed and its sub-basins and calculated pesticide pressure indicators on demand for each aggregation level defined.