A Comparative Evaluation of Hydromorphological Assessment Methods Applied in Rivers of Greece

Konstantinos Stefanidis,Theodora Kouvarda,Konstantinos Gritzalis,Anna Latsiou,Elias Dimitriou,George Papaioannou

doi:10.3390/hydrology9030043

Konstantinos Stefanidis, Theodora Kouvarda + Show 4 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/hydrology9030043

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Abstract

The ecological assessment of all surface water bodies in Europe according to the Water Framework Directive involves the monitoring of biological, physicochemical and hydromorphological quality elements. For the hydromorphological assessment in particular, there are numerous methods that have been developed and adopted by EU member countries. With this study, we compared three different methods (River Habitat Survey, Morphological Quality Index and River Hydromorphology Assessment Technique) applied in 122 river reaches that are part of the National Monitoring Network of Greece. The main objectives were (a) to identify whether different assessment systems provide similar classifications of hydromorphological status and (b) to distinguish strengths and weaknesses associated with the implementation of each method. Our results show that the River Hydromorphology Assessment Technique (RHAT) and the Morphological Quality Index (MQI) resulted in the same classification for 58% of the studied reaches, while 34% of the remaining cases differed by only one quality class. Correlations between the two indices per river type (ICT) showed that the two indices were strongly correlated for water courses located at low altitudes. Concerning the HMS index of the River Habitat Survey (RHS), which is an index that reflects the overall hydromorphological pressure, it showed larger differences with the other two indices, mainly because it classified more sites as “Poor” and “Bad” quality classes. Based on our results, we recommend that the two indices, RHAT and MQI, can be implemented complementary to the RHS for providing a rather easy and quick assessment of the overall hydromorphological status, at least until a national hydromorphological database is compiled that will allow for the proper adaptation of the Habitat Quality Assessment (HQA) index.

Highlights

Introduction iationsThe Water Framework Directive (WFD) [1] aims to restore or maintain a good ecological state of the inland waters of all EU member states
In addition the among previous analysis, we explored the assessments from three methods to vary the intercalibration riverwhether types (ICTs) that are used forthe the three methods vary among the intercalibration types (ICTs) that are usedinfor theassessed
We performed a comparative assessment of three different methods in rivers of Greece with the main objective to identify whether the River Hydromorphology Assessment Technique (RHAT) and Morphological Quality Index (MQI) methods can be successfully implemented complementary to River Habitat Survey (RHS), resulting in similar results

Summary

Introduction

The Water Framework Directive (WFD) [1] aims to restore or maintain a good ecological state of the inland waters of all EU member states. To this end, the ecological monitoring and assessment implementation is based on biological, hydromorphological and physicochemical quality elements. The WFD defines hydromorphological elements to have a supporting “role” for biological quality elements [2]. This means that for a water body to achieve “High” ecological status, there must be no or very minor alterations of hydromorphological quality elements. For the “Good”, “Moderate”, “Poor” and “Bad” statuses, the hydromorphological quality elements should support the biological quality elements for each class

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