The Freshwater Health Index (FHI) 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:
Because the FHI helps make trade-offs more explicit, it can help direct policies and practices that maintain healthy watersheds into the future.
The Freshwater Health Index is intended to be applied at the drainage basin scale, where resource management decisions are most relevant and decision support is likely to be most useful, but it can also be applied at smaller or larger scales. It can also be adapted to meet socio-political, economic and ecological variations as well as data availability and informational needs.