New Measurements of the River Environment: River Ecosystem Health Assessment in China

With the developing awareness on the natural attributes of rivers and the problems of river ecosystems, the objectives of water environment management should extend from single water quality protection to the overall management of aquatic ecosystems. River health assessment can be used as a water environment management tool, which is important to sustainable management of watershed and regional ecological protection. However, the river health concept hasn't been introduced into environmental measurement systems, and a set of national river health assessment system is absent in China. As a result, in this paper, the significance of river health to water environmental management is discussed, and the methods and recommendations on building Chinese river health assessment systems are proposed.