Progress in monitoring river quality

Almost 40 years after the first Water law in France established a comprehensive and decentralised water-management system ; the European water framework directive voted on 23 October 2000 initiated a new phase in the strategy to monitor and evaluate water quality. The changing regulatory context was a chance to study the evolutions in river-quality systems and to measure the progress in monitoring over several decades and in the various methods to evaluate the chemical and ecological quality of water.