Assessment tools
ASSESS-HKH will transfer knowledge gained through European research to the HKH countries of Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan. The Asian partners will provide the knowledge about Asian river catchments and their management needs. Thus the ASSESS-HKH research activity represents a bilateral transfer of knowledge involving the European and Asian scientists working to strengthen and formally link their efforts in improving science based tools for ecosystem management.
The ASSESS HKH research work intends to achieve applicable tools for river assessment. This will lead to the development and validation of a three-tier methodology to detect hot spots in rivers of the HKH region. The three methods provide three levels of increasing discriminatory power to detect the effects of environmental impacts on the benthic macroinvertebrates, i.e. from a rapid field bioassessment method over a score-based assessment method that needs only simple data processing facilities (MS Excel) to an assessment method that will lead to a special application software.