Building water and chemicals budgets over as complex hydrographic network

The Brussels Metropolitan Community (BMC) is a densely populated, trans-regional area of about 800 km² and 2,000,000 inhabitants, over which Brussels economy and urbanization will thrive and expand in the coming decades. The interconnected system composed of the Zenne River and the Charleroi-Brussels-Scheldt canal, which supports the complex hydrographic network in the BMC, constitutes the backbone for the sustainable development of the economy in this area.
Profoundly modified over the last two centuries to address several issues such as flooding and water pollution, this hydrographic network constitutes a paradigm of a complex system submitted to multiple types of human perturbations impacting the hydrologic functioning, the watercourse, the water budget, and the water quality. In addition, as it spans over the three Belgian regions (Flanders, Brussels and Wallonia), the management of this system is divided in sections which are under the supervision of different organisms and administrations.
Our general objective was to study the propagation of the anthropogenic disturbances in this aquatic system that goes through of such a densely populated and economically active area, with multiple connections and sources of pollutants. We thus established a box-model representation of water budgets and estimated polluting chemicals fluxes for the whole BMC area. As identifying and quantifying every individual chemical is a tremendous and costly task, this aim was achieved by combining classical and innovative hydrological and sediment dynamics analyses with the use of selected chemical tracers representing different types of human activities: agriculture, industries and urban surface runoff and sewage.

ISBN:9781138029774