Aquatic Ecosystem Classification for Ontario’s Rivers and Streams, Version 2
The Aquatic Ecosystem Classification (AEC) is a science-based tool used to classify Ontario’s rivers and streams based on their physical attributes (e.g., water temperature, turbidity, channel slope, upstream drainage area). The AEC reduces the complexity of these vast aquatic networks in Ontario by using consistent and quantitative methods to build a standardized data foundation that helps us understand and manage streams including landscape-scale planning and policy development. At the most basic level, we hope that people can derive expectations about the nature of a stream reach or segment without having to actually visit a stream.










