Groundwater is a hidden global keystone ecosystem

Abstract

Groundwater is a vital ecosystem of the global water cycle, hosting unique biodiversity and providing essential services to societies. Despite being the largest unfrozen freshwater resource, in a period of depletion by extraction and pollution, groundwater environments have been repeatedly overlooked in global biodiversity conservation agendas. Disregarding the importance of groundwater as an ecosystem ignores its critical role in preserving surface biomes. To foster timely global conservation of groundwater, we propose elevating the concept of keystone species into the realm of ecosystems, claiming groundwater as a keystone ecosystem that influences the integrity of many dependent ecosystems. Our global analysis shows that over half of land surface areas (52.6%) has a medium-to-high interaction with groundwater, reaching up to 74.9% when deserts and high mountains are excluded. We postulate that the intrinsic transboundary features of groundwater are critical for shifting perspectives towards more holistic approaches in aquatic ecology and beyond. Furthermore, we and Environmental DNA

A new species of the genus Proasellus (Crustacea: Isopoda: Asellidae) from the Abin River basin, with the preliminary data on the diversity of the genus in the southwestern foothills of the Russian Caucasus

“…Groundwater ecosystems are among the most understudied habitats of our planet (Saccò et al, 2023). Current knowledge on the diversity of subterranean and hyporheic crustaceans of the Caucasus is still fragmentary, despite the fact that quite a lot of publications with a description of stygobiotic diversity have appeared recently (Marin, 2017(Marin, , 2019(Marin, , 2020Marin, Palatov, 2019a, 2023aGrego et al, 2020;Palatov, Sokolova, 2021;Marin et al, , 2023Rendoša et al, 2021;Anistratenko et al, 2022;.…”