The Ecological Assessment of Rivers and Estuaries: Present and Future

Dear Colleagues,

The 20th century brought an exponential increase in bioassessment methods for rivers and estuaries. In Europe, bioassessment methods and classification systems were improved by the publication of the Water Framework Directive (WFD), which also led to the investigation of new biological and more complex indices. As the WFD influenced the development of new methods across the world, European tools were also influenced by methods developed in the USA, Canada, and other parts of the world. In Europe, this progress resulted in the need for an intercalibration process to compare assessments of water bodies. Yet, development of assessment tools for rivers/estuaries and their implementation in national monitoring programs is far from being a reality across the world, even in temperate regions, but specifically in tropical or dry climates. It is not clear how unsatisfactory classifications of rivers/estuaries have led to restoration and mitigation measures and to the improvement in water bodies. Official monitoring programs are still mostly based on structural aspects of communities, i.e., in the taxonomic composition and abundance, whereas the functional assessments are not conducted. Finally, the last years have witnessed an impressive effort to find tools based on molecular data (DNA, eDNA) with the aim of reducing costs and time and obtaining more complete overviews of the ecosystems, including rare or cryptic species that could be neglected by morphological evaluations. All these aspects are included within the scope of this Special Issue.

Dr. Maria João Feio
Dr. Joao M. Neto
Guest Editors

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