Aquatic macroinvertebrates as indicators of the condition of small lowland rivers
Environmental flow is the amount of water that must flow in a river to meet the water needs of aquatic and water-dependent ecosystems. It is an important criterion for water management – the value of environmental flow is determined by the nature of the river, the organisms living in it and the hydrological conditions. Determining the value of environmental flow in water management pragmatics, however, is a tricky business – methods based on hydrological indicators are too stationary to account for the periodic variability of the needs of riverine organisms and water-dependent ecosystems. Methods based on habitat analysis of aquatic organisms, on the other hand, are very complicated and require a lot of field research.
In our latest article published in Ecohydrology, we share our findings on the possibility of determining the environmental flow of a small lowland river based on the functional diversity and distribution of aquatic macroinvertebrates.