Biological Water Quality Assessments and Criteria in Korea

The attainment of sustainable water environment is not enough with only the clean water, but it should sustain healthy and diverse aquatic life. Aquatic life is affected by various factors such as physical habitat conditions, water chemistry, and biological interactions, and thus good condition of both physical and chemical water quality is prerequisite for sustaining healthy organisms. Therefore, biological assessment, along with other physical and chemical assessments, is crucial for evaluating the health of a water body. Biological assessments in Korea were just formalized in the national 10 year master plan (2006-2015), named as “the basic plan for water environment management ” with the adoption of narrative biological criteria in the law of water quality and aquatic ecosystem conservation in 2006. These efforts have resulted in a significant change of a paradigm in the management of water environment, and a shift away from a sole reliance on regulatory and administrative activities as the principal measures of success to the inclusion of measures based on environmental results. We expect that integrating biological assessments into existing assessment programs will provide the information critical to protect and restore aquatic ecosystems