Abstract Aquatic invertebrates constitute a large proportion of biological diversity in wetlands and can be useful indicators of wetland environmental conditions; however, their assessment can be time consuming and requires special expertise. So it may be useful to screen for potential surrogates to represent overall aquatic invertebrate assemblages and make bioassessments more feasible. The composition of aquatic invertebrate communities were studied in 15 floodplain wetlands of the Wusuli River and 14 non-floodplain wetlands, all located in Northeastern China’s Sanjiang Plain. Our study showed that aquatic invertebrate assemblages in non-floodplain wetlands differed from floodplain wetlands. Then the potential surrogates were identified for 11 aquatic invertebrate groups across all 29 wetlands. Gastropoda proved to be potential surrogates of overall aquatic invertebrate species density, species richness and community similarity, and could be used to classify floodplain and non-floodplain wetlands. Nine Gastropoda species were indicators for specific wetland types. Using snail assemblages as surrogates for overall aquatic invertebrate communities may make rapid assessments of wetland condition using aquatic invertebrates simple yet effective.