Chapter 8 Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Methods: A Tool for Assessing River Ecosystem Health Using Functional Macroinvertebrate Traits

Publisher Summary Macroinvertebrate communities are widely used for assessing river-ecosystem health, and this has led to the development of a large amount of indices. Functional diversity analysis has already proved useful in the study of aquatic ecosystems. Assessment techniques have been developed using the distribution of macroinvertebrate functional groups across the physical heterogeneity of streams and rivers, instead of taxonomical analysis. Thus, observations focus on spatial and temporal modifications of ecological traits and, eventually, they can be used to determine ecosystem attribute surrogates. The use of invertebrate traits to determine the most common running-water ecosystem attributes has been introduced recently and has been successfully adopted for the assessment of river oxbows in Florida. This chapter applies Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) methods to river functionality assessment to generate information and to provide further understanding as a basis for river-restoration strategies.