Water resources in the system of sustainable development of Ukraine are some of strategic and vital natural resources. However, such resource like water, is dependent to the influence of technical progress, and if contaminated, perhaps can be exhausted. Therefore, in modern conditions of the rapid economic development of our state, there is a need in the formation and implementation of state policy of sustainable water use, which will allow us to solve complex urgent problems (inefficient water use, unreasonable water use strategy, unsatisfactory construction and operation of water management systems, the lack of clear environmental standards and criteria, and others) in the shortest possible time. In our opinion the solution of the problems, which were noted above, is impossible without a complete display of dynamic natural environment and monitoring the impact of human activities on the integration of the virtual playback of anthropogenic and natural environment. A lot of scientists continue to study the legal regulation of maintenance of the natural resource cadastres, including water cadastre and the procedural regulation of various aspects of activity of management bodies in the sphere of ecology, including cadastral, in particular, A. P. Getman, V. M. Yermolenko, I. I. Karakash, V. I. Andreitsev, V. V. Nosik, Y. S. Shemshuchenko, Z. V. Yaremak and others. Despite their significant contribution to the development of the problems in this area, there was put out of sight a special study of the state water cadastre and cadastral process that is relevant nowadays. Purpose of the article is the study of the definitions «maintenance of the state water cadastre» and «cadastral process», as well as the determination and justification of the corresponding relationship between the specified definitions. The maintenance of cadastre is a complex notion, which represents not only the safekeeping of electronic and/or paper information carrier within the prescribed period, but the rapid introduction into the inventory of all information received from all state bodies authorized to maintain the cadastre. Maintenance of state water cadastre can be understood in a broad and narrow sense. Being closely linked to natural resource management the cadastral process does not cover all management activities, but only that part, the implementation of which contains the application of substantive law. Beyond the cadastral process there is located the part of management, which is associated with the formation of bodies of public administration. Such activity is controlled by the administrative-legal regulations and is related to the sphere of legal regulation of administrative law, and therefore is a component of the administrative process. Due to the diversity of procedural steps of the cadastral process it has a certain commonality. Including certain types of procedural activities of the competent authorities, which are regulated by the procedural rules of environmental law, the cadastral process is united by the common subject of legal regulation as a specific group of the public relations in natural resources management. The analysis of theoretical studies concerning the raised question enables us to draw the following conclusions that in essence the term «cadastral process» applies not only to the state water cadastre, but also to other types of natural resources cadastres (the state land cadastre, the state forest cadastre, the state cadastre of the animal world, the state cadastre of occurrence and manifestations of minerals and others). If you compare the correlation of such notions as «maintenance» and «cadastral process», you come to the conclusion that these terms are related as the part and the whole. In our case, the cadastral process will appear as a general term, and maintaining the state water cadastre will appear as its part which, accordingly, has certain peculiarities caused by specificity of the object in towards of which the cadastre has been maintained. So, the process of gathering information, view received data, quantitative and qualitative characteristics of a natural object will be specific to each cadastre, and so on.