Abstract
Ecological water quality has greatly improved since the nineteen seventies. However, this improvement stagnated during the last decade. A major cause is the presence of multiple interacting stressors acting at different spatial-temporal scales, making it difficult to identify measures to alleviate stress and improve water quality. By taking the biology of streams within a regional and water type specific context as a starting point, we will identify diagnostic traits of macroinvertebrate assemblages and parameterize stress to assess and predict the effects of single stressors and stressor interactions in multistressed conditions. This methodology can be used to derive successful restoration measures.
Netherlands