The Chamberonne River is located in the west of Lausanne in the Canton of Vaud. It is 23.5 km long and it is composed of the Sorge and the Mèbre tributaries. Its catchment has an area of about 40 km2 and is part of the broader Rhône River catchment. It has a mixed land use with a sharp transition from upper forested and agricultural areas to lower urban areas. The river flows through the EPFL and UNIL campuses before reaching Lake Léman. With a north-south flow, its catchment has the typical configuration of the Swiss Lemanic Rivers.
Challenges / Opportunities
The Chamberonne is a compelling case study for water resources management because it encapsulates many of the major challenges faced by urban rivers: administrative responsibilities are shared across 13 municipalities; there is a sharp land use transition from forest and agriculture to urban (the urban surface increased by 11% in the period 1985-2018 and it’s been further increasing since then), resulting in the alternation of protected areas, naturalistic trails but also kilometers of river network channelized underground; water quality is often poor due to outdated hydraulic infrastructures, stormflow bypass systems often releasing untreated sewage water into the river during storms, and multiple unidentified point pollution sources. These challenges are common among many urban rivers in Switzerland and worldwide.
Because of these challenges, the Chamberonne is also at the center of two major initiatives carried out by the Canton of Vaud: the Plan régional d’évacuation des eaux (PREE) de la Chamberonne (whose development started in 2018 with the goals of improving the management of the Chamberonne drainage basin) and the Broye-Chamberonne renaturation project (https://broye-chamberonne.ch/ecf-chamberonne/), which will substantially modify the morphology of the river close to its mouth.
The proximity of the Chamberonne to the UNIL/EPFL campuses represents a unique opportunity for teaching, research and innovation. Many Environmental Science courses include excursions and activities on the Chamberonne and some are developed in collaboration with local associations. We are currently documenting these activities with the goal of creating an academic network around the Chamberonne and development new ideas. Every person/group interested in collaborating and developing new projects is welcome to join this network.
Ongoing activities
Besides the major initiatives led by the Canton of Vaud, there exist various activities carried out by individual research groups at UNIL and EPFL. Some of them are listed below.
The UNIL hydrology group (P. Benettin) has deployed sensors at 4 locations on the Mèbre and Sorge and a weather station on the Géopolis building. Weekly samples of rainwater and streamwater are also collected for chemical analyses. Ongoing master projects aim at sampling water and sediments during storm events.
The EPFL DigitalTwins project (P. Perona and R. Bernier-Latmani) has deployed several sensors along the Sorge tributary to study the impact of EPFL campus on streamwater.
The UNIL group led by Céline Weyermann and previously by Nicolas Estoppey deployed passive samplers at many locations on the Chamberonne waters to identify point pollution sources along the river (Pfeiffer et al., 2024, in french).
The former EPFL ECHO lab (A. Rinaldo) used to operate 4 discharge gauging stations a meteo station on campus and a pluviometer and collected about 7 years of data from 2012 to 2019.
Interactive map
The map below shows the watershed (approximate surface area based on topography) and the main gauging points along its network.