A framework to diagnose the causes of river ecosystem deterioration using biological symptoms

River assessments are predominantly based upon biological metrics and indices selected or designed to integrate the impact of multiple causes of deterioration (stressors) operating at various spatial scales. Yet, the integrative nature of many bioassessment systems does not allow for tracing back individual stressors and their influence on the overall assessment result. Thus, river managers often fail to link bioassessment with programmes of management measures, to improve ecological quality.
Here, we present a novel diagnostic approach that allows to estimate the probability of individual stressors being causal for biological degradation at the scale of individual riverine ecosystems. Similar to medical diagnosis, we use various symptoms (macroinvertebrate metrics) and probabilistically link them to various potential causes of ecological status degradation (stressors). Symptoms and causes are informed by a training dataset of 157 samples (stressors, taxa lists) from central Europe...