Assessment of Water Bodies using Eco-exergy based Ecological health index Methodology

Human-affected freshwater ecosystems are becoming stressed and dysfunctional at regional and global level. ecosystem health integrates the factors like ecological,economic,social and human health. the services provided by these ecosystems are extremely important to human welfare and therefore,it is essential to assess the ecological health of water bodies. the paper reviews the indices and indicators used by researchers for assessing the ecological health. out of the large number of indices,few indices developed like imeera,hehi,etc. are reported to provide precise results,but are time consuming and needs lengthy proceed. in the present paper,the ecological health index methodology (ehim) along with/without tropical state index (tsi),being less time consuming and provide precise results,has been applied as a tool to assess the ecological health of baiyangdian lake (china) and found to have results similar to that obtained by xu et al. [25] using eco-exergy based index (ebi) with tsi. the results indicated that the ecological health of baiyangdian lake is of middle health category i.e. (ehim,40-60),indicating bad quality of water with no life supporting ability. ehim,therefore,as an important tool based on eco-exergy to assess the ecological health of water body in any geographical region and can recommended for ecological health assessment of water ecosystems.