Like the other French canals, the Burgundy Canal participates in the water management at the scale of the entire territory by regulating rivers and smoothing floods for a better use of the flows. It is supplied by several reservoirs and numerous hydraulic networks made up of aqueducts, valves, weirs, ditches... It is punctuated by 189 lock sites and a few trenches to cross the 984 feet (300 m) of vertical drop on the Yonne slope and the 656 feet (200 m) on the Saône side.