The September meeting of ALICE (from 17th to 19th), organized by partners University of Rennes 1 and National Center for Scientific Research, took place at University of Rennes 2, France. In the course of 3 days partners discussed advancements on the case studies and work packages and visited Couesnon field with stakeholders from SAGE Couesnon (Plan of Development and Management of Waters).
SAGE establishes the basic guidelines for the management and preservation of water resources on Couesnon. Its main issues are: to find quality water, protect and restore aquatic environments, protect Mont-Saint-Michel bay and raise quantitative issues (drinking water, flood, drought, etc.).
Couesnon catchment is the largest dairy producer region on France.
Rennes gets 25% of Couesnon water and there are serious concerns about the quality of water due to pesticides presence (above the limits), and nitrate concentration (having a fixed a limit way superior than the rest of Europe – around 40-50mg/l).
Other problems such as agriculture intensification and hedge removal are also important.
One of the target sites of the visit on French Case Study was the Regional Natural Reserve where UR1 and CNRS have collected UAV imagery that will serve to map complex vegetation patterns.
Furthermore, there have been exchanges among ALICE partners to collect vegetation data for habitat validation – to sample grasslands, forests, coastal marshlands, and wetlands and aquatic e-DNA data in order to complete existing databases with aquatic biodiversity data.
For further work, the need to build “successful stories” illustration the Opportunities for Blue-Green Infrastructure Networks (BGINs), have been addressed and, for the stakeholder’s participatory process, guidelines will be developed for semi-structured interviews to gather information on Stakeholders views and perception on the system.
