Assuming that the structure and dynamic of stream habitats are determined by the surrounding watershed, streams structures are now consensually considered as hierarchical systems. Understanding the functioning of river ecosystem requires taking the organisation of its spatial nested hierarchy into account. Although few studies attempted to assess the response from biological organisms to pressures and driving forces at different spatial scales, they failed at describing the pressure data as a real hierarchical context. Our objective was to introduce the hierarchical process of pressures and to test if the relations between local scale pressures and biological organisms were influenced by physiographic patterns. We therefore developed a hierarchical model that relates benthic macro-invertebrate index to hydromorphological and physico-chemical local pressures and assumed that, due to streams hier archical organization, organisms may respond differently to a specific pressures pool, according to broader scale characteristics of the studied site. Our results show a significantly improved understanding of macro-invertebrates response to human pressure s in precise geographic areas with specific natural conditions and catchment-scale pressures. We demonstrated that taking the regional geographical and driving forces patterns in consideration improves the capacity of understanding the response of biological organisms to local environmental pressures.