Applicability of the ‘Watershed Habitat Evaluation and Stream Integrity Protocol’ (WHEBIP) in assessment of the stream integrity in Bregalnica River Basin

ABSTRACT

This paper reports the assessment of the ecological integrity of streams in Bregalnica River Basin with emphasis on river Bregalnica as the biggest and most important watercourse in Eastern Macedonia. The results have principally been derived from remote sensing data and set up in a model build up on Watershed Habitat Evaluation and Stream Integrity Protocol (WHEBIP). WHEBIP effectiveness in predicting ecological integrity of streams has been assessed by correlation analyses derived upon data on macroinvertebrate biotic indices and physico-chemical parameters on 35 localities throughout the basin. The statistical analyses confirmed the capacity of WHEBIP to predict stream site-specific features with great accuracy in the case of Bregalnica.

The results obtained in this study contribute towards the improvement of the WHEBIP protocol and in general, promotes applicability of stream integrity assessment tools in setting priorities for integrated watershed management.

KEYWORDS:

• Landscape
• riverine
• GIS
• management

Acknowledgements

Part of the macroinvertebrate data were obtained within the project ‘Ecological Data Gap Analysis and Ecological Sensitivity Map Development for the Bregalnica River Watershed’, Contract No., 0205-145/10 of 16.06.2014, implemented within the Nature Conservation Programme in Macedonia, project of Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), coordinated by Helvetas Swiss Intercooperation and Farmahem. The authors thank the Macedonian Ecological Society for the technical support in the preparation of this study and Lj. Stefanov for the graphical design of the contents of Figure 1. The authors also thank all reviewers for their valuable input on an earlier version of the manuscript.