Abstract

."The potential to use the RIVPACS (River InVertebrate Prediction and Classification System) methodology to standardise LIFE (Lotic-invertebrate Index for Flow Evaluation) across all physical types of site, as a ratio of observed to expected LIFE (denoted LIFE O/E) was assessed. LIFE O/E could provide an estimate of the impact of flow-related stress of macroinvertebrates at a site. This could then be incorporated in the Environmental Weighting system for abstraction licensing and water resource assessments. It is recommended that the algorithm for calculating LIFE be incorporated into an updated version of the RIVPACS software. Further research was needed to assess the influence of sampling variation, to improve predications and the setting of targets for expected LIFE for large slow flowing rivers, and to investigate the use of environmental variables derived from GIS to provide temporally-invariant predictions of the expected fauna and expected LIFE at any site."