Wetlands in the lower Gilgel Abay River catchment have been adversely affected by a number of anthropogenic activities. As a result, their ecological integrity, socioeconomic and ecosystem services are highly threatened. Thus, this study was conducted to assess the impact of anthropogenic activities on the ecological status of wetlands in the lower Gilgel Abay River catchment. Macroinvertebrate based multimetric index of biotic integrity was developed with the purpose of providing ecological data to wetland managers and other stakeholders. Both biological and physicochemical data were collected from six purposely selected study wetlands using standard procedures in the wet and dry seasons of the years 2017 and 2018, respectively. Water quality parameters including temperature, dissolved oxygen (DO), electric conductivity (EC), total dissolved solids (TDS), Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD), turbidity (TU), salinity and pH were measured in-situ using portable HACH multimeters, Total Suspended solid (TSS) and nutrients were analyzed in the laboratory using standard methods for water quality analysis. Macrophyte and Macroinvertebrate data were also collected from each of the study wetland during the wet and dry seasons. Macrophytes were collected manually using a quantitative quadrat method and macroinvertebrates were collected semi-quantitatively using D-framed dip net. The spatial and temporal variation of habitat and water quality parameters were analysed with Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney U-tests respectively, whereas the spatial and temporal differences of biological data were analyzed using one-way ANOVA and independent sample t-tests. The relationship between biological and environmental variables was evaluated by using multivariate analysis (RDA). Data on habitat quality parameters such as Human Disturbance Score (HDS) and water physicochemical variables were used to classify and characterize the sampling sites. Based on the results of HDS, sampling sites were categorized into least impaired (RA1 and RA2) and impaired sites (CA, EST, DM and SEM). The mean HDS and physicochemical parameters significantly varied between the sampling sites (Kruskal-Wallis test, p