4. Sampling

4.1 Sampling and sampling

The terms "sampling" and "sampling" are used in a wide variety of fields (industrial production, agri-food, environment, etc.). In the water sector, these terms can be defined as follows.

Sampling [d]: The act of taking a representative portion of a body of water for the purpose of examining various defined characteristics.

Withdrawal : The act of extracting a certain volume from a body of water.

These definitions, derived from the water sector, apply in principle to other media. The major difference between the terms "sampling" and "taking" concerns the representativeness of the fraction taken. In the case of "simple" sampling, there is in theory no representativeness objective. On the...