“The paper and the underlying research are mainly related to a new methodology, which is composed of several steps... each of which is potentially useful for water management.”

Biological assessment provides simple and effective measures to evaluate the ecological status of freshwater ecosystems. After having been used for detecting the impact of organic pollution for almost a century, it is now becoming obvious that other stress types—acidification, toxic pollution, and hydromorphological degradation—are reflected by river-inhabiting organisms as well.

We developed the prototype of a system for river assessment, which is based on benthic invertebrates, (e.g., insect larvae) inhabiting rivers, which assesses the impact of different stressors. This methodology has recently been used by researchers in various countries to develop and to adapt national or regional systems for river monitoring, which are now being applied and intensively discussed in literature.

The paper and the underlying research are mainly related to a new methodology, which is composed of several steps (see next question), each of which is potentially useful for water management. However, some questions of basic research are closely related to our work, in particular, if (and how) hydromorphological degradation (e.g., channel alteration, removal of riparian forest) affects river biota.

This paper is an outcome of a European Union-funded research project: The Development and Testing of an Integrated Assessment System for the Ecological Quality of Streams and Rivers throughout Europe using Benthic Macroinvertebrates, contract no. EVK1-CT1999-00027. The AQEM system was developed within this project.

A new legislation in Europe, the so-called "Water Framework Directive," calls for new methods of river assessment and river basin management. We aimed at transferring our more basic limnological knowledge into application through the development of products useful for implementing the Water Framework Directive.