title: [Bacterioplankton index of biotic integrity (BP-IBI): an approach for assessing river ecosystem health in Dianchi watershed].
abstract: The index of biotic integrity (IBI) has been widely applied to the health assessment of river ecosystems. However, the currently available IBI methods are lack of decomposer-based assessment. Based on the T-RFLP result of bacterioplankton, we developed the bacterioplankton index of biotic integrity (BP-IBI) after the screening of major environmental factors and candidate metrics to assess the health of the inflow rivers in Dianchi Watershed. The evaluation result indicated that the eco-health conditions of 11 reference sites were either level I (8 sites) or level II (3 sites), while the 27 damaged sites were level I (4 sites), level II (14 sites), level III (7 sites), and level IV (2 sites), and there was no level V site. Compared with the other IBI methods and the integrated pollution index, BP-IBI showed better effect in reflecting the influence of the key environmental factors, the land use types and the upstream water types in river ecosystems. Therefore, BP-IBI is a good method to characterize the health status of river ecosystems.
authors.affiliation: College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China. yhuang@pku.edu.cn
authors.forename: Yi
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.forename: Zhong-Ya
authors.initials: ZY
authors.lastname: Shu
mesh_terms: D001419:Bacteria / Q000302:isolation & purification*; D002681:China; D017753:Ecosystem; D004784:Environmental Monitoring / Q000379:methods*; D010933:Plankton / Q000302:isolation & purification; D045483:Rivers / Q000382:microbiology*