Relationship between benthic macroinvertebrate bio-indices and physicochemical parameters of water: a tool for water resources managers

The ecosystem health of rivers downstream of dams is among the issues that has become focus of attention ofmany researchers particularly in the recent years. this paper aims to deal with the question, how the environmentalhealth of a river ecosystem can be addressed in water resources planning and management studies. in this study,different parameters affecting the ecosystem of river-reservoir systems, as well as various biological components ofriver ecosystems have been studied and among them, benthic macro-invertebrates have been selected. amongvarious bio-indices, biodiversity indices have been selected as the evaluation tool. the case study of this research isaboulabbas river in khuzestan province in iran. the relationship between the biodiversity indices and physicochemicalparameters have been studied using correlation analysis, principal component analysis (pca), and genetic programming(gp). margalef index was selected as the appropriate bio-index for the studied catchment area. the relationship foundin this study for the first time between the margalef bio-index and physicochemical parameters of water in theaboulabbas river has proved to be a useful tool for water resources managers to assess the ecosystem status whenonly physicochemical properties of water are known.