Freshwater Health Index

The index measures the overall health of a watershed by making clear connections between the ecosystem and the benefits it provides to people. It allows resource managers, engineers, policy makers and other stakeholders to evaluate scenarios, understand tradeoffs, prioritize interventions and communicate basin health with a broad audience by: transforming data into commonly scaled indicators (on a 0-100 scale), providing a baseline diagnosis of a basin’s health; tracking freshwater health over time through an iterative process between scientists, end-users and other stakeholders for a result that is salient, credible and useful; and evaluating potential impacts from climate change, land-cover change, population growth and water allocation decisions. Because the FHI helps make trade-offs more explicit, it can help direct policies and practices that maintain healthy watersheds into the future.