World Development Information Day - Understanding and raising awareness of water resources: a key challenge for OiEau

"You can only manage well what you know well". This adage is particularly important for water, in order to promote access to this resource in terms of quality and quantity for all uses.

For many years, OiEau has been promoting the development of Water Information Systems (WIS) in France, Europe and internationally, with references in 60 countries.

The WISs devised by OiEau are specifically designed to meet the needs for knowledge, analysis and decision-making at the level of towns, basins, transboundary basins and countries.

Collection, standardisation and interoperability, pooling, banking: all the stages required to make reliable data available are mastered by OiEau's experts.

For example, since its inception, OiEau, with the support of the French Office for Biodiversity (OFB), has run SANDRE, the French national administration service for water data and reference systems.

Disseminating knowledge is also one of OiEau's missions. Synthesising and popularising knowledge to make it available to as many people as possible is part of its DNA.

Together with the OFB, OiEau runs the Water & Biodiversity portal, which brings together the documentary resources of 28 public contributors on water and biodiversity.

OiEau publishes a number of newsletters which enable readers to follow the latest developments in the sectors with either general coverage, such as AquaVeille, or thematic coverage (Aquatic Biodiversity, Hydrological Situation Bulletin, Gest'eau, Water Economy, etc.).

OiEau regularly publishes "state of the art", which take stock of knowledge and enable insiders to update their knowledge and novices to learn about a new field. Two titles have recently been published:

- Management of aquatic macro-waste in watercourses

- Exploratory study on the resilience of fish communities in rivers faced with water shortages.

With the same objective of sharing knowledge, OiEau creates and makes available educational illustrations adapted to the communication needs of the various players involved in water and the environment, particularly the general public. A variety of formats are available: maps, key figures, data visualisations, etc. to share scientifically reliable and educational information freely on the Internet.