New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation has developed a nutrient biotic index (NBI) to characterize stream nitrate and phosphorus profiles using macroinvertebrate assemblage data and taxon-specific tolerance values.  These NBI scores accurately reflected nutrient concentrations at chosen sites and cluster analysis of the underlying community data revealed a three-tiered scale of eutrophication.  Colleagues have previously developed a nutrient index based on diatom assemblage data, so we applied the NBI approach to New Jersey using an extensive macroinvertebrate database and compared results of the two indices. Since New Jersey shares three contiguous Ecoregions with New York, we anticipated that New York tolerance values would be valid for these analyses. Preliminary analyses imply weak relationships between the NBI scores calculated for New Jersey sites and either nutrient or land cover based on New York’s tolerance values. Since only 10.4% of New Jersey taxa were assigned tolerance values by the New York study, work is underway to calculate tolerance values for New Jersey taxa using New Jersey nutrient data. Resulting NBI scores are likely to more accurately reflect nutrient conditions in New Jersey, be more informative for comparison with benthic diatom indices, and reveal more about the broad applicability of the NBI approach.