Nowadays, pesticides are recognized as having adverse effects on the environment and human health. Monitoring the level of pesticides pollution in aquatic ecosystems involves the establishment of a sampling strategy based on a water spot sampling, followed by a stage of processing and analysis of samples. Furthermore, the concentration of these pollutants can fluctuate over time and therefore a low sampling frequency does not give a representative picture of the real level of pollution and cannot describe faithfully the changing of the quality of the water bodies.Thus, this work focuses on an alternative sampling method based on the use of passive samplers to monitor the level of contamination of surface and groundwater by pesticides. Two types of passive samplers, the polar Chemcatcher and the POCIS (Polar Organic Chemical Intégrative Sampler) were studied in order to compare the effectiveness of these tools for the diagnosis and the monitoring of aquatic pollution by polar pesticides.The first step of the study consists the validation of these two passive samplers, which is based on the laboratory and in-situ calibration of POCIS and polar Chemcatcher, to allow their use as tools for quantitative analysis for the assessment of the average concentration of pesticides in water bodies. The second part of the work is more focused on the applicability of these passive samplers for the study of the spatial distribution of pesticides, the identification of pollution sources and the assessment of pollutants transfer (surface water/groundwater).
