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Assessment of the health of urban streams is an important theoretical and practical topic, which is related to the impacts of physiochemical processes, hydrological modifications, and the biological community. However, previous assessments of the urban water quality were predominantly conducted by measuring physical and chemical factors rather than biological monitoring. The purpose of this study was to develop an urban stream multimetric index (USMI) based on benthic macroinvertebrates to assess the health of aquatic ecosystem in Jinan City. Two hundred and eighty-eight samples were collected during two consecutive years (2014-2015) from 48 sites located within the city. Metrics related to the benthic macroinvertebrate richness, diversity, composition and abundance, and functional feeding groups were selected by using box-plots and the Kruskal-Wallis test. The final index derived from selected metrics was divided into five river quality classes (excellent, good, moderate, poor, and bad). A validation procedure using box-plots and the non-parametric Mann-Whitney U test showed that the USMI was useful to assess the health of urban streams.

s u m m a r yFreshwater ecoregion is currently widely used by biologists, conservators and resource managers. Most of ecoregion delineations are developed at the basin scale and are not fully adapted in a practical manner because operational water resources management is primarily conducted by political administrative departments. In this study, an ecoregion delineation framework was proposed to classify three-level ecoregions in Jinan City with geographic information systems and cluster analysis. The first level ecoregion was composed of three watersheds (a part of the Yellow River, Xiaoqing River and Tuhaimajia River) plus the urban area, which was primarily determined on the basis of the city administrative divisions and river watersheds. The classification of the second level ecoregion is primarily based on the spatial heterogeneity of land use. The third level ecoregion was delineated for each second level ecoregion by using the cluster analysis on water quality. At the same time, administrative boundaries were used to rectify the boundaries of each ecoregion in this study to facilitate the administration of each ecoregion. Furthermore, ecological health assessment (IBI) based on fish communities were employed to validate the freshwater ecoregion. The results demonstrated that 73.3% of ecoregions were in line with the distribution of fish IBI, indicating that the freshwater ecoregions are acceptable for future water resources management.

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