Identifying and validating freshwater ecoregions in Jinan City, China

Freshwater ecoregion is currently widely used by biologists, conservators and resource managers. Most of ecoregion delineations are developed at the basin scale and are not fully adapted in a practical manner because operational water resources management is primarily conducted by political administrative departments. In this study, an ecoregion delineation framework was proposed to classify three-level ecoregions in Jinan City with geographic information systems and cluster analysis. The first level ecoregion was composed of three watersheds (a part of the Yellow River, Xiaoqing River and Tuhaimajia River) plus the urban area, which was primarily determined on the basis of the city administrative divisions and river watersheds. The classification of the second level ecoregion is primarily based on the spatial heterogeneity of land use. The third level ecoregion was delineated for each second level ecoregion by using the cluster analysis on water quality. At the same time, administrative boundaries were used to rectify the boundaries of each ecoregion in this study to facilitate the administration of each ecoregion. Furthermore, ecological health assessment (IBI) based on fish communities were employed to validate the freshwater ecoregion. The results demonstrated that 73.3% of ecoregions were in line with the distribution of fish IBI, indicating that the freshwater ecoregions are acceptable for future water resources management.