The waterlice (Asellidae, lsopoda) are one of the rare family of metazoans containing both a great number of surface aquatic species and subterranean aquatic species. This makes it an ideal case study for understanding eco-evolutionary processes taking place during the transition to groundwater habitats. Comparative studies can be performed on multiple independent pairs of surface and subterranean species which provide true replicates of the ecological transition from surface water to groundwater. However, such studies require new collaborative research tools to assemble taxonomic, phylogenetic, distributional, and biological data for a species-rich family which is distributed across North America, Europe, North Africa and Asia. Here, we introduce the World Asellidae Database, a tool that Is being developed to allow multiple laboratories to jointly produce, visualize and query morphology-based and DNA-based species occurrence data and their associated biological materials. Access to metadata and data will be granted to users long before data are publicly released, thereby promoting collaborative projects among laboratories and reducing duplicate sampling and sequencing works.