/ Progress toward the goal of restoring integrity to the waters in the United States has been difficult to assess.This difficulty may arise from the type of regulatory policy that has been traditionally used. With the advent of widespread wastewater treatment, the use of a planning approach employing receiving water impact standards may offer a more practical and direct means of defining and assessing integrity. Biological community response is shown to offer an integrated approach to implementing and evaluating water quality management policy, The state of Maine (USA) has revised its water quality law by utilizing biological community response to assess integrity. This law is presented as a model that employs impact measures and a planning approach for the implementation of water quality management policy.The Federal Water Quality Act (PL 100-4) calls for the restoration and maintenance of the physical, chemical, and biological integrity of the nation's waters. Integrity, however, has proven to be an elusive term as evidenced by a surfeit of inadequate definitions (Ballentine and Guarraia, 1977). Long-established water quality assessment practices have never directly addressed the measurement of ecological integrity (Karr and Dudley, 1981) and, in fact, inherently hinder the application of this more holistic view. Historically, water quality policy has relied upon performance-based standards to establish allowable pollutant loads, monitoring requirements, and enforcement actions. These standards were designed to alleviate distinct pollution problems, especially to reduce waterborne pathogens, maintain dissolved oxygen, and control toxic substances.If maintenance of ecological integrity is considered the ultimate goal of water quality management, a new approach to management may be required. The traditional use of performance standards is inadequate because they are not designed to address broad goals such as ecological integrity. The state of Maine has approached this problem by revising its water quality law to incorporate biological community response as a standard that addresses ecological impact rather than discharger performance. By establishing statutory definitions of different levels of integrity, the condition of the biological community is used as a standard for water quality classification. With clearly defined goals

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