2022 Issues

Roel F. H. M. van Bezouw, James McCulloch, Frans Janssens & Matty P. Berg

Abstract

The black, globular springtail Sminthurinus lawrencei Gisin, 1963 has long been thought of as a rare species, known from only few localities in only three countries, up to and including 2020. This work describes the discovery of this species in other countries resulting from identification of newly collected specimens, a re-analysis of older collection material and scrutiny of publicly available high-definition images with location tags. This work includes the first records of this species from Canada, France and the Netherlands. Previously, the brief description of S. lawrencei by Gisin resulted in many researchers considering it to be a doubtful species. To identify similarly black-coloured Sminthurinus-species without characteristic pigmentation, reliance on the presence or absence of setae on the dentes of the furca is a crucial aid for proper identification. This has previously posed challenging due to the lack of proper systematic description of the positioning of these setae. In this work we describe a recent upsurge of recordings for S. lawrencei, describe its morphological characteristics and clarify the dental chaetotaxy (following Bretfeld 1999) to aid in the identification of Sminthurinus ‘niger’-group, which S. lawrencei is a member of. We confirm that S. lawrencei is a bona fide species, but vastly overlooked and should be looked for in Western Europe and North America. By contrast, S. niger (Lubbock, 1870) is likely to be much rarer in Western Europe than currently anticipated, with many past recordings likely representing other species, including S. lawrencei.

Keywords
Sminthurinus niger | dental chaetotaxy | distribution | digital imaging | Collembola

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DOI 10.25674/so94iss3id283

Johannes Frisch & Tobias Mainda

Abstract

The informal Scopaeus kokodanus species group (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae: Paederinae: Scopaeina) is defined using diagnostic primary and secondary sexual characters. It comprises S. kokodanus Cameron, 1938 (Papua New Guinea), S. arfakmontium spec. nov. (Indonesia: West Papua), S. balkei spec. nov. (Indonesia: Papua) and S. potamides spec. nov. (Solomon Islands). The species are diagnosed including distributional information and comparative notes.

Keywords
Taxonomy | morphology | exoskelettal characters | genital characters | distribution

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DOI 10.25674/so94iss3id303

Julia Plunger, Elia Guariento, Michael Steinwandter, Filippo Colla, Alexander Rief & Julia Seeber

Abstract

Land-use changes, especially agricultural intensification has increased in the last decades leading to a decrease in biodiversity. In Europe, grasslands have been influenced by humans for centuries and millennia and management intensity has increased since the 20th century. In this small-case study, we investigate how management intensity affects ground-dwelling predators in montane hay meadows in South Tyrol, an Alpine region in Northern Italy, using the pitfall trap method. As expected, species composition differed significantly when comparing the predator communities of extensive and intensive meadows, with the former supporting a higher predator species richness, and the latter showing higher proportions of frequent and euryoecious species. Regarding their activity densities and Shannon diversity, we did not find clear differences. Investigating selected ecological species traits, we found differences for moisture requirements and ecological tolerance between the two management types, with xerophilous species being more abundant in the extensive meadows, and stenoecious species more abundant in intensive meadows. In this study, we found management intensity of montane grasslands to have a limited influence on the biodiversity patterns of ground-dwelling predators. However, individual predator groups showed clear reactions to the intensity of management (i.e., decrease or increase in activity density, species richness and Shannon diversity). We conclude that a intensive management of grasslands in combination with local habitat specifics does not lead to a homogenisation of the predatory arthropod community like it was found in other studies. Our study contributes to a better understanding of scarcely investigated predator communities and their diversity in differently managed Alpine grasslands.

Keywords
Soil | Arachnida | Coleoptera | Formicidae | species diversity

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+ Supplementary Material Table S1A–D and Figures S1–S4 on www.soil-organisms.org

DOI 10.25674/so94iss3id306

Alexander Bruckner

Abstract

In recent years, a number of collaborative projects began to collect consistent data on soil animal communities with the aim to understand, model, and map edaphic biodiversity, and to support environmental planning and decision making. Especially when operating on an international scale, it is vital for these programs to develop standardized protocols for properly sampling and processing soil cores. While guidelines for sampling, extracting, identifying and enumerating animals from soils have been published, the influence of transport and storage conditions on the recovery of animals has received very little attention. In this paper, the effects of improper treatment of cores on the extraction efficiency of predatory mites (Gamasina) from a temperate deciduous forest soil are investigated. Neither prolonged storage, shaking, compression or any of two combination treatments (compression + prolonged storage; shaking + prolonged storage) exerted a significant influence on the total abundance or the body size distributions of the mites. In contrast, both warming over 25°C and overfilling the sample containers of the Tullgren extractor significantly and drastically reduced the recovery of the animals, irrespective of body size. In conclusion, while the total (group) abundance of gamasid mites seems to be rather insensitive against improper sample treatment, the temperature of cores during transport and storage and a suitable volume of material in the extractor containers need to be adressed when planning the logistics of large scale sampling campaigns. Further studies on this topic are encouraged that also include other animal groups, other climate zones, and preferrably work on the level of species.

Keywords
Biodiversity | extraction | sampling | soil fauna | soil microarthropods

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Supplementary Material Table S1–S2 on www.soil-organisms.org

DOI 10.25674/so94iss3id304

Mark A. Anthony* and Arthur Gessler

Abstract

The impacts of climate change are increasingly threatening terrestrial ecosystems. Understanding how this will influence fungal communities (i.e. the mycobiome) is one of the most consequential domains of climate change research because fungal functions, like decomposition and mycorrhizal symbiosis, feedback to influence climate change. Efforts to study fungal functioning have been stymied by technological limitations and the complexity of fungal biology compared to prokaryotes, but recent molecular advances now enable us to study their functional responses to climate change in greater detail. Here, we announce an open invitation for collaboration with researchers across the globe studying terrestrial ecosystem responses to climate change. In particular, we invite submissions of soil or DNA extracts isolated from climate change field experiments for detailed characterization of fungal community structure using full-length ITS DNA metabarcoding and a novel probe capture and enrichment next generation sequencing technique to quantify fungal functional genes involved in oxidative and hydrolytic enzyme biosynthesis, carbohydrate metabolism, organic and inorganic nitrogen cycling, phosphorus acquisition, stress tolerance, and mycorrhizal symbiosis. By contributing samples, supporting analyses, and helping to draft manuscripts, co-authorship will be offered to all collaborators. We will also freely provide the unique datasets we generate from samples collected at your experiment for downstream analyses. We hope that by crowd-sourcing collaborations, we will be able to establish consistent ecological principles for how fungi respond to climate change, enabling us to more accurately forecast the impacts of future global changes on ecosystem function.

Keywords
Climate change | fungi | genomics | global change | metagenomics

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DOI 10.25674/so94iss3id300

Maria A. Tsiafouli1*, Jérôme Cortet2 and David Russell

Abstract

Soil biodiversity, and particularly soil fauna, drives essential soil functions leading to crucial ecosystem services. Many research activities over the last decades have produced data, which are however widely dispersed and not easily available, hence their re-usage is limited. Here, we aim to collect a maximum of already published or available data on soil fauna (micro-meso- and macro-fauna) from the European territory, by creating the first comprehensive ‘European Atlas of Soil Fauna’. With this initiative, we envision a vibrant collaborative effort in which ‘data owners’ become ‘co-creators’ of the Atlas by contributing their (published) data to an overall soil fauna data set. The data set will be used to produce information and maps on soil fauna distribution and diversity across Europe, to support research, policy, education, conservation and monitoring activities.

Keywords
Soil biodiversity | soil functions | ecosystem services | edaphobase data warehouse | soil maps

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DOI 10.25674/so94iss3id307

Birgit Lang & David J. Russell

Alejandro Caballero, Anton Potapov, Diana Rueda-Ramírez & Stefan Scheu

Mikhail B. Potapov, Anna I. Bokova, Charlene Janion-Scheepers, Natalia A. Kuznetsova, Miryam S. Merk, Ksenia S. Panina, Anton M. Potapov & Anna K. Saraeva

Jérôme Mathieu, Ana C. Antunes, Sébastien Barot, Ana E. Bonato Asato, Marie L. C. Bartz, George G. Brown, Irene Calderon-Sanou, Thibaud Decaëns, Steven J. Fonte, Pierre Ganault, Benoit Gauzens, Konstantin B. Gongalsky, Carlos A. Guerra, Tomislav Hengl, Patrick Lavelle, Raphael Marichal, Henry Mehring, Clara P. Peña-Venegas, Daniel Castro, Anton Potapov, Elisa Thébault, Wilfried Thuiller, Martijn Witjes, Chi Zhang & Nico Eisenhauer

Karel Tajovský, Václav Pižl, Peter Čuchta, Julia Shrubovych & Wanda Maria Weiner

Abstract

Professor Josef Rusek, soil zoologist, ecologist, apterygotologist and university lecturer, died on January 13, 2022, aged 83 years. He has indelibly inscribed himself in the memory of many Czech and international zoologists and entomologists, particularly those specialised in soil zoology, but also more broadly oriented soil biologists and ecologists. His studies of soil invertebrates, especially Collembola, Diplura and Protura, and also the results of his research in soil biology and ecology, soil microstructure and the processes of formation and classification of humus forms, are known not only in our country but also abroad.

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DOI 10.25674/so94iss1id179

Carla Klusmann, Simone Cesarz, Marcel Ciobanu, Olga Ferlian, Malte Jochum, Martin Schädler, Stefan Scheu, Marie Sünnemann, Diana H. Wall & Nico Eisenhauer

Abstract

Human-induced global environmental change is predicted to alter the stability and functioning of ecosystems worldwide. Most research in recent decades has focused on studying climate-change effects on aboveground systems, causing a poor understanding of belowground responses. However, gaining knowledge on environmental-change effects on soil biota is of crucial importance, as soil-ecosystem services are indispensable for human well-being and contribute fundamentally to the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems. Nematode communities play a central role in various soil ecosystem processes and are therefore commonly used as biological indicators to assess soil conditions and soil health. While causing overall shifts in community composition patterns, which are most often examined, climate change might also alter nematode population dynamics and the sex ratio (number of males per female). Previous studies on plant-parasitic nematode species suggest that changes to unfavorable environmental conditions trigger reduced development of females and favor sexual rather than parthenogenetic reproduction. Therefore, we are presenting the working hypothesis that predicted climate change causing reduced resource availability and enhanced environmental stress will lead to an increased proportion of males in soil nematode communities. Our systematic literature review revealed that climate- and environmental change effects on the sex ratio of free-living soil nematode populations are inconsistent, but heavily understudied. Data on sex ratios have been treated mostly as additional information, presented without any underlying theory and hypotheses, as well as limited discussion. In this perspective paper, we thus propose that future studies should include clear hypotheses and test if the sex ratio of free-living nematodes increases with climate change due to more stressful environmental conditions and low resource availability. Furthermore, we conclude that experimental studies investigating the specific roles of male and female nematodes are needed to better predict the implications of a changing climate on soil ecosystem functioning.

Keywords
climate change, human impact, nematode sex ratio, soil biodiversity

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DOI 10.25674/so94iss1id174

Anika Neu, Andreas Allspach, Kristin Baber, Peter Decker & Willi E. R. Xylander

Abstract

Although citizen science (CS) has proven to be a powerful tool to detect man-made biodiversity loss, existing CS monitoring programs are highly biased towards ‘charismatic’ species groups, while others are largely neglected and monitoring data are lacking. This is especially true for the diverse groups of soil dwelling animals. To close this data gap in Germany we started the first CS monitoring program for soil animals with special focus on the identification of terrestrial isopods (Oniscidea), centipedes (Chilopoda) and millipedes (Diplopoda): BODENTIERhoch4. The main functionalities of the combined web and mobile application are outlined. Moreover, we carried out training workshops with interested citizens to transfer basic knowledge of how to use the mobile application, to identify soil organisms and to upload acquired data to a repository. In an accompanying study, we investigated the interrelationship of workshop attendance and long-term commitment as citizen scientists in monitoring programs. Users of BODENTIERhoch4 that a) had attended and b) had not attended a workshop were asked to answer questions related to the efficiency and impact of the workshops. We found that workshop attendance significantly increased the participants estimated knowledge gain, interest in soil animals and, corresponding to that, willingness to further engage in the project. Our results may inspire future CS programs to offer training opportunities for prospective citizen scientists and thereby promote data quality as well as long-term engagement.

Keywords
biodiversity monitoring, Diplopoda, Chilopoda, project engagement, soil animal conservation

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DOI 10.25674/so94iss1id181

Adam Clark, Nico Eisenhauer & David Tilmann

Abstract

Ants are important components of many terrestrial ecosystems because of their high abundance, their central position in food webs, and because they can strongly influence ecosystem properties such as soil aeration, nutrient cycling, and plant community composition. Moreover, ants are also known to respond strongly to changes in environmental and biological conditions. In particular, two major anthropogenic environmental impacts – climate change and the loss of primary producers – may have interactive effects on ant communities. To examine this potential interaction, we quantified pitfall trap sampled ant diversity and activity across a fully factorial experiment manipulating temperature and grassland plant species richness at the Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve in Minnesota, USA. Consistent with previous arthropod studies, we found a significant increase in sampled ant diversity in plots with higher sown plant species richness, such that plots with the largest number of plant species also had the highest sampled ant diversity. However, the strength of this relationship declined significantly in experimentally warmed subplots, especially when considered for higher aggregated spatial scales of samples. Taken together, these results suggest that the positive effects of plant diversity on sampled ant diversity may be partially undermined under warmer conditions.

Keywords
ant, climate change, community ecology, diversity loss, experimental warming

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DOI 10.25674/so94iss1id177

Anton M. Potapov, Xin Sun, Andrew D. Barnes, Maria J. I. Briones, George G. Brown, Erin K. Cameron, Chih-Han Chang, Jérôme Cortet, Nico Eisenhauer, André L.C. Franco, Saori Fujii, Stefan Geisen, Konstantin B. Gongalsky, Carlos Guerra, Jari Haimi, I.Tanya Handa, Charlene Janion-Scheepers, Kamil Karaban, Zoë Lindo, Jérôme Mathieu, María Laura Moreno, Maka Murvanidze, Uffe N Nielsen, Stefan Scheu, Olaf Schmidt, Clement Schneider, Julia Seeber, Maria A. Tsiafouli, Jiri Tuma, Alexei V. Tiunov, Andrey S. Zaitsev, Frank Ashwood, Mac Callaham & Diana H. Wall

Abstract

Here we introduce the Soil BON Foodweb Team, a cross-continental collaborative network that aims to monitor soil animal communities and food webs using consistent methodology at a global scale. Soil animals support vital soil processes via soil structure modification, consumption of dead organic matter, and interactions with microbial and plant communities. Soil animal effects on ecosystem functions have been demonstrated by correlative analyses as well as in laboratory and field experiments, but these studies typically focus on selected animal groups or species at one or few sites with limited variation in environmental conditions. The lack of comprehensive harmonised large-scale soil animal community data including microfauna, mesofauna, and macrofauna, in conjunction with related soil functions, microbial communities, and vegetation, limits our understanding of biological interactions in soil systems and how these interactions affect ecosystem functioning. To provide such data, the Soil BON Foodweb Team invites researchers worldwide to use a common methodology to address six long-term goals: (1) to collect globally representative harmonised data on soil micro-, meso-, and macrofauna communities, (2) to describe key environmental drivers of soil animal communities and food webs, (3) to assess the efficiency of conservation approaches for the protection of soil animal communities, (4) to describe soil food webs and their association with soil functioning globally, (5) to establish a global research network for soil biodiversity monitoring and collaborative projects in related topics, (6) to reinforce local collaboration networks and expertise and support capacity building for soil animal research around the world. In this paper, we describe the vision of the global research network and the common sampling protocol to assess soil animal communities and advocate for the use of standard methodologies across observational and experimental soil animal studies. We will use this protocol to conduct soil animal assessments and reconstruct soil food webs at sites associated with the global soil biodiversity monitoring network, Soil BON, allowing us to assess linkages among soil biodiversity, vegetation, soil physico-chemical properties, climate, and ecosystem functions. In the present paper, we call for researchers especially from countries and ecoregions that remain underrepresented in the majority of soil biodiversity assessments to join us. Together we will be able to provide science-based evidence to support soil biodiversity conservation and functioning of terrestrial ecosystems.

Keywords
biogeography, ecosystem functioning, macroecology, soil fauna, soil biodiversity

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DOI 10.25674/so94iss1id178