Assessment of river ecosystem health and its prospect

The river ecosystem health is closely related with social economics,human activity and eco-environment.It is a hot spot of research to evaluate river health in multi-disciplines of sciences.This paper introduces the concept and criteria of ecosystem health assessment,generalizes the meaning of the river ecosystem health and reveals the importance of research on this subject.A detailed comparison is made about development process,advantages and disadvantages between the Predictive Models and the Multi-metrics,which are two methods of the river ecosystem health assessment in terms of assessment principles.Finally,a prospect about the river ecosystem health assessment is put forward.Focus should be given to researches on development trend in long run with watershed scale and assessment indexes as well as standards based on RS,GIS and GPS technologies.