PRIMARY RESEARCH PAPER A macroinvertebrate multi-metric index for Ethiopian highland streams Temesgen Alemneh . Argaw Ambelu . Benjamin F. Zaitchik . Simon Bahrndorff . Seid Tiku Mereta . Cino Pertoldi Received: 8 May 2018 / Revised: 27 June 2019 / Accepted: 2 August 2019 Ó Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 Abstract Headwater streams in the highland regions of Ethiopia are exposed to severe human disturbances because of rapid population growth. Protection and management of headwater streams require the devel- opment of informative indices that can capture disturbance and assess streams water quality in highland regions. Therefore, we developed a multi- metric index based on macroinvertebrate communi- ties, to assess the ecological condition of the headwa- ter streams in the Ethiopian highlands. We reviewed 38 potential metrics, representing various aspects of the macroinvertebrate assemblages, and selected four of them [total family richness, Simpson index, percentage of shredder, and family richness of EOT (Ephemeroptera, Odonata, and Trichoptera)] as final core metrics. A trisection inter-quartile range system was applied to derive scores for each core metric at impaired and reference sites. The macroinvertebrate multi-metric index (MMI) distinguished well between impaired and reference stream sites and was nega- tively correlated with the degree of disturbance. The results suggest that the MMI is robust measure of disturbance and can be used as a sensitive tool for evaluating the ecological condition of headwater streams in Ethiopian highlands. Keywords Headwater streams Á Multi-metric index Á Macroinvertebrates Á Biological monitoring Á Tropical Á Ethiopia Handling editor: Marı ´a del Mar Sa ´nchez-Montoya Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-019-04042-x) con- tains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. T. Alemneh (&) Á B. F. Zaitchik Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21210, USA e-mail: tyimani1@jhu.edu; temu.1221@gmail.com T. Alemneh Á A. Ambelu Á S. T. Mereta Department of Environmental Health Sciences and Technology, Jimma University, P.O. Box 378, Jimma, Ethiopia S. Bahrndorff Á C. Pertoldi Section of Biology and Environmental Science, Department of Chemistry and Bioscience, Aalborg University, Fredrik BajersVej 7H, 9220 A ˚ lborg East, Denmark C. Pertoldi Aalborg Zoo, A ˚ lborg, Denmark 123 Hydrobiologia https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-019-04042-x