Ecological health assessment of Ethiopian wetlands: Review and synthesis

Abstract

Assessment and monitoring of wetlands' ecology is vital to evaluate their ecological conditions, and provide information to support management decisions. Cognizant of this fact, wetland ecological assessment has been an important research agenda. As elsewhere in the world, wetland ecological assessment has been conducted in Ethiopia. This review aims to assess the spatial coverage of wetland ecological studies, the types of assessment tools employed for ecological assessment, the existing status of wetlands' ecologies and the drivers of wetland ecological decline. The review shows that not more than 30 ecological assessment studies have been conducted and published in reputable scientific journals. These studies mainly focused on only three river and lake basins and not more than 40 wetlands. This suggested wetlands’ ecological assessment has gotten scant research attention in the country. Physicochemical indicators have widely been employed to assess the ecological status of wetlands. Even though biological organisms are better indicators, biological approaches have been less applied in Ethiopia to assess the ecological status of wetlands. Therefore, there is an urgent need to monitor and assess Ethiopian wetlands by developing and adopting wetland assessment tools mainly using biological indicators.