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Short abstract

Historically erased, groundwater fauna indicators for groundwater quality increasingly question the resilience of EU water governance, challenging currently prioritized chemical metrics. Whose resilience counts when subterranean life reframes care, accountability, and visibility in aquatic futures?

Long abstract

Groundwater, the world’s largest terrestrial freshwater biome, has long been managed as a resource, ignoring its role as a habitat. Research by aquatic ecologists reveals groundwater fauna (stygofauna) as a critical, yet overlooked, indicator of ecological health and resilience. Through (long-term) groundwater monitoring, basic research demonstrates how stygofauna, highly endemic, sensitive to pollution, and historically excluded from policy and regulation, reframes groundwater as a living ecosystem rather than a mere water reserve. This shift challenges dominant technoscientific paradigms that prioritize chemical and quantitative metrics over biological integrity.

Based on participant observation of and sample drives of aquatic ecologists in Germany and Croatia, we explore stygofauna as a boundary object, bridging scientific, policy, and public imaginaries of aquatic futures. Stygofauna offer a living archive of environmental change: Their presence (or absence) narrates stories of urbanization, agricultural runoff, and climate stress, revealing groundwater as a dynamic, social-ecological assemblage that unsettles standard indicators of “good groundwater status”. Yet, integrating stygofauna into regulatory frameworks such as the EU Water Framework Directive is fraught with tension: Who defines “resilience” when indicator species conflict with extractive logics? How do aquatic ecologists negotiate the epistemic authority of policy makers and the power of lobbyists with the material agency of subterranean life? With this contribution, we argue that stygofauna’s emergence as “policy tool” is not just a technoscientific “update” but rather a political act that redistributes care, accountability, visibility in water governance. What versions of aquatic resilience become legible when groundwater is recognized as habitat?