Glossary

"A - E"

• Abiotic: In ecology, a factor linked to the environment, independent of living beings.
• Amphihalin: Refers to a species migrating between the marine environment and a freshwater environment.
• Anadromous: Refers to a species that reproduces in rivers or streams and returns to the sea to grow up (e.g. salmon, shad, sea trout, lampreys).
• Biocenosis: All beings living in the same environmental conditions, in a given area.
• Benthos: all aquatic organisms living in close contact (directly on or in the immediate vicinity of the seabed) with the seabed (as opposed to the pelagos).
• Benthic: Relating to the bottom of seas or fresh waters, regardless of depth. Synonym: demersal.
• Catadrome : Conversely, a species that reproduces at sea and grows in freshwater (e.g. eel, flounder, mullet).
• Ecological continuity: Free movement of living organisms and their access to areas for reproduction, growth, feeding or shelter, as well as the natural transport of sediments from upstream to downstream and from one bank to the other.
• Dismantling: Technical operation to remove an obstacle (such as a dam) from a watercourse.
• Downstream: Action of moving downstream in a watercourse for a migratory fish.
• Diadrome: refers to a migratory fish species that spends part of its life cycle in a river and the rest in the sea, or vice versa. This includes both anadromous species (e.g. salmon, shad, sea trout and lamprey) and catadromous species (e.g. eel, flounder and hogfish).
• Deletion: General operation (including the dismantling mentioned above) aimed at returning a watercourse to its original course.

"F - K"

• Spawning ground: an aquatic place where fish and amphibians, and by extension molluscs and crustaceans, reproduce.
• Hyporheic: Refers to the environment existing in the interstices of a sediment saturated with water. A hyporheic zone exists beneath an estuary dominated by a river and extends over the freshwater/brackish water/salt water boundary. For more details, see brackish water, brackish water zone and freshwater description. The hyporheic zone of the estuary is therefore not only influenced by surface water and, presumably, estuarine exchanges of groundwater, but is further complicated, biologically, by a salinity gradient that runs through it.
• Guideau: A type of fishing that takes place in riverbeds and on the seashore, using large funnels formed by touching nets, the tips of which end at the entrance to a net shaped like a creel to catch the fish (fyke nets are also used for this type of fishing).

"L - Q"

• LIDAR: Technology based on a device that calculates the distance to an object by transmitting and receiving the light wave: Refers to a freshwater aquatic environment with little or no circulation.
• Lotic: said of or relating to flowing water, when the hourly flow of a watercourse has a certain speed. Lotic waters are the opposite of stagnant lentic waters.
• Macrobenthos: a subset of the aquatic benthos, plankton, which is visible to the naked eye (as opposed to the microbenthos).
• Macroinvertebrate: all animals visible to the naked eye (generally larger than 0.5 mm) that do not have a skeleton. Aquatic macroinvertebrates live in watercourses on and in sediments.
• Macrophyte: aquatic vegetation of continental wetlands (usually waterlogged or flooded with fresh water) and coastal wetlands (salt or brackish water), visible to the naked eye.
• Metadata: "Data about data " means data (information) used to define or describe another donnée (information) whatever its medium (paper or electronic). It generally answers the questions What? What? Who? Where? and How concerning an item of information: what does this information describe? who produced this information? When was the information produced? and When is it updated? Where was this information produced or what area does it concern? and How was this information produced?
• Mounting: the action of moving a migratory fish upstream in a watercourse.
• Pelagos: all organisms living in a pelagic environment, with no connection to the seabed.
• Periphyton: all aquatic organisms that live attached to the surface of plants or submerged objects in rivers or lakes.
• Phenotypic: relating to the phenotype. Refers to a trait, whether or not it can be passed on to offspring.
• Phytoplankton: A group of cyanobacteria and microalgae (microscopic plants), invisible to the naked eye, present in surface waters and drifting with the currents.
• PIT-tag: implantable transponders used for the unique identification of individual items. Their small size, biocompatibility and the frequency at which they transmit information make them ideal for identifying and tracking wildlife, including fish, birds, reptiles or mammals.
• Propoagule: is defined as any germ, part or structure of an organism (plant, fungus or bacterium), produced sexually or asexually, capable of developing separately to give birth to a new organism identical to the one that formed it.

"R - V"  

• Food web: representation of all the food-related interactions between living beings in an ecosystem. These interactions include predation, parasitism, the decomposition of organic matter and the consumption of plants.
• Riparian: describes what relates to the banks of a river. The riparian zone (or ripicole or riparian) is therefore the more or less wide zone running alongside a watercourse and covered with vegetation called riparian vegetation, gallery forest or grass strip depending on the nature of the latter. 
• Ripisylve: all the wooded, bushy and herbaceous formations present on the banks of a watercourse, river or stream (the notion of bank designating the edge of the minor bed or ordinary bed, excluding floods, of the watercourse not submerged at low water).
• Rivular: an organism that lives in streams or on their banks.
• Thalassotoque: Said of a thalassotous organism whose breeding area is in the ocean (catadromous). 

"W - Z"

• Zooplankton: a group of animal plankton, most of them microscopic, made up of a large number of animal species of great morphological diversity.