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Assessing and monitoring the ecological integrity of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems is a vital component of effective water resource management, sustainable land use planning, and biodiversity protection and management. Our objective was to quantify, evaluate and map measures of ecological condition and vulnerability for 32 sub-basins in South Carolina. Principal Component Analysis of 29 integrity measures identified six significant components that explained 78.5 percent of the variance in indicator values among watersheds. These components corresponded to indicators associated with urban development and human stressors, habitat extent and priority species occurrences, agricultural development and land protection, riparian land use and stream impairment, and agricultural conversion and abandonment. Composite measures of watershed integrity provided a simple means for prioritizing watersheds for potential management activities. The approach used in this study ultimately provides a flexible means for assessing broad-scale patterns of biotic integrity that can be tailored to highlight specific management needs or goals while facilitating the selection of a suite of complementary measures that effectively characterize system properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]