Global fine-resolution data on springtail abundance and community structure

Journal article

Springtails (Collembola) inhabit soils from the Arctic to the Antarctic and comprise an estimated ~32% of all terrestrial arthropods on Earth. Here, we present a global, spatially-explicit database on springtail communities that includes 249,912 occurrences from 44,999 samples and 2,990 sites. These data are mainly raw sample-level records at the species level collected predominantly from private archives of the authors that were quality-controlled and taxonomically-standardised. Despite covering all continents, most of the sample-level data come from the European continent (82.5% of all samples) and represent four habitats: woodlands (57.4%), grasslands (14.0%), agrosystems (13.7%) and scrublands (9.0%). We included sampling by soil layers, and across seasons and years, representing temporal and spatial within-site variation in springtail communities. We also provided data use and sharing guidelines and R code to facilitate the use of the database by other researchers. This data paper describes a static version of the database at the publication date, but the database will be further expanded to include underrepresented regions and linked with trait data.

Authors: Potapov, AM; Chen, T-W; Striuchkova, AV; Alatalo, JM; Alexandre, D

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Nature Research
• Journal: Scientific Data
• Volume: 11
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 22-22
• Article number: 22
• Publication date: 2024-01-03
• DOI: 10.1038/s41597-023-02784-x
• EISSN: 2052-4463
• ISSN: 2052-4463
• Language: English
• Keywords: Springtail; Biology; Habitat; Database; Ecology; Abundance (ecology); Woodland; Geography