Application of a GIS-based Groundwater Vulnerability Assessment in a Participatory Process

The European Water Framework Directive (WFD) came into force in December 2000 and demands for a good status of all European waters by the year 2015. To achieve that objective, the WFD provides for a Programme of Measures in article 11. The research project PartizipA at the Institute of Environmental Systems Research (University of Osnabrück, Germany) supports regional stakeholders in the Hase river catchment in Northern Germany to select groundwater protection measures. The project has been carried out besides the official implementation process of the WFD; hence, decisions made in the project’s participation process have no legal commitment for the stakeholders. A vulnerability assessment approach for the groundwater in the study area is presented which takes into account diffuse nitrogen emissions of agriculture as well as the groundwater pollution potential and the stakeholder judgement of the regional adaptive capacity. After a description of the study area in section 3, the methodological approach of the vulnerability assessment is outlined in section 4 and includes a short description of the two applied models STOFFBILANZ and DRASTIC. Section 5 refers to the use of GIS and models in the PartizipA project and is followed by a summary of the most important experiences out of the project concerning model application in the participatory process in section 6.