the coastal areas are highly productive system that is degrading due to receiving huge amount of various pollutants. despite of the important of north caspian sea estuaries the quality index of benthic fauna received less attention. in this survey the benthic population of 18 rivers estuaries in southern caspian sea were investigated. the benthic sampling and identification were conducted at ei...

Biomonitoring programs to access the ecological integrity of freshwaters tend to rely exclusively on structural parameters. Here we evaluated stream ecological integrity using (a) benthic macroinvertebrate derived metrics and a biotic index as measures of structural integrity and (b) oak litter decomposition and associated fungal sporulation rates as measures of functional integrity. The study ...

We use bird distributions in non-forested coastal wetlands of the Great Lakes to illustrate a new, conceptually explicit method for developing biotic indicators. The procedure applies a probabilistic framework to derive an index that best “fits” an observed assemblage of species, based on preliminary information about species’ responses to human environmental disturbance. Among 215 coastal wetl...

BACKGROUND Nowadays, aquatic organisms are used as bio-indicators to assess ecological water quality in western regions, but have hardly been used in an Iranian context. We, therefore, evaluated the suitability of several indices to assess the water quality for an Iranian case study. METHODS Measured data on biotic (fish and macroinvertebrates) and abiotic elements (28 physicochemical and hab...