The Urgent Need for River Health Biomonitoring Tools for Large Tropical Rivers in Developing Countries: Preliminary Development of a River Health Monitoring Tool for Myanmar Rivers

Anthropogenic pressures such as river infrastructure, agriculture and power generation are rapidly increasing in Southeast Asia, aimed at providing food security within the region. However, this will lead to unintended river health consequences, and, currently, most Southeast Asian countries have no country-specific tools for monitoring river health.

In Myanmar, one of Southeast Asia's poorest and most rapidly developing countries, no country-specific tools exist, and there is an urgent need to provide tools that can inform better management and trade-off decision making.

This research evaluated three rapid macroinvertebrate bioassessment methods under Myanmar conditions. The objective of the research was to assess the applicability of existing internationally accepted indexing methods for use in Myanmar.