Suitability of invertebrate data for assessing groundwater ecosystem health

The focus of New Zealand’s Biological Heritage National Science Challenge Project 1.5 was improving knowledge of groundwater invertebrate biodiversity, specifically the abundance and distributions of species. As part of this project, the suitability of the resulting invertebrate biodiversity data was assessed for developing indices of groundwater ecosystem health, similar to indices widely used for measuring and monitoring ecosystem health in surface water environments.