Towards creating the first European Atlas of Soil Fauna
- 1CEFE, Univ. Montpellier, CNRS, EPHE, IRD, Univ. Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, 34000 Montpellier, France
- 2Department of Ecology, School of Biology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, U.P.B. 119, 54124, Greece
- 3Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, Vejlsøvej 25, DK-8600, Silkeborg, Denmark
- 4Dept. Soil Zoology; Section Mesofauna, Senckenberg Museum of Natural History Görlitz, Postfach 300154, 02806 Görlitz, Germany
The protection of soil biodiversity is essential for ensuring soil functioning and provisioning of related ecosystem services, but also the conservation of species per se. For this purpose, it is essential to know what soil organism is where and how it is influenced by environmental, climate and human activities.
Numerous studies (there are over 1400 published articles) have been elaborated in Europe regarding soil fauna. A data platform to store data on soil fauna already exists and is currently under further development to become a pan-European data warehouse for soil biodiversity (https://www.eudaphobase.eu/). Though, the data stored in this database until now comprises only a small percent of the available data. Hence, it is evident that a compiled dataset providing an overall understanding of the distribution of several taxa across European biomes and under different land use still is missing.
Attempting to fill this gap, we start a new initiative within the framework of the Cost Action EUdaphobase CA18237: the creation of the first European Atlas of Soil Fauna. We aim to map, summarize and upscale the current knowledge on soil fauna to help in providing support to the scientific community and directions to stakeholders and policymakers. We seek collaboration (data holders and experts) to identify, collect and analyze data of all groups of micro-, meso- and macrofauna in Europe.
This presentation will focus on the aims of this initiative and the way we plan to collect data and involve people.
How to cite: Cortet, J., Tsiafouli, M., Krogh, P.-H., and Russel, D.: Towards creating the first European Atlas of Soil Fauna, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-6933, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-6933, 2022.
