Species traits for future biomonitoring across ecoregions: patterns along a human-impacted river

SUMMARY 1. Current budgets for environmental management are high, tend to increase, and are used to support policy and legislation which is standardized for large geographic units. Therefore, the search for tools to monitor the effects of this investment is a major issue in applied ecology. Ideally, such a biomonitoring tool should: (1) be as general as possible with respect to its geographic application; (2) be as specific as possible by separating different types of human impact on a given ecosystem; (3) reliably indicate changes in human impact of a particular type; and (4) be derived from a sound theoretical concept in ecology. 2. We developed an approach to biomonitoring which matches these ‘ideal’ characteristics by focusing on numerous, general biological species traits (e.g. size, number of descendants per reproductive cycle, parental care, mobility) and on the habitat templet concept, which relates trends in these general species traits to disturbance patterns. Using

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