Global fine-resolution data on springtail abundance and community structure

Abstract

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.

Fig. 1

Data collection and evaluation in #GlobalCollembola. Most of the data are raw data collected from archives of the contributing authors of the paper. The data were collected using an Excel template and included in the final database after technical and expert cleaning of each dataset. No data were excluded, instead, expert evaluation is provided for each dataset. Whenever possible, we recorded species occurrences in individual samples (soil cores).

Fig. 2

Database structure of #GlobalCollembola. Database consists of three main spreadsheets: (1) Events, (2) Occurrences, and (3) Taxonomy. The spreadsheets can be linked, summarised, and filtered using the associated R script to produce site-level averages.

Fig. 3

Global distribution of the sampling points and habitat types represented in the database. Density of samples per pixel in a global 100 × 100 coordinate grid are shown with grayscale (light – few samples, dark – many samples). Number of collected samples in each habitat type are shown with a doughnut chart; habitat classification follows the European Environmental Agency.

Fig. 4

Temporal coverage of the database. Frequency histograms show the number of samples collected in different years (a) and months (b), and the number of sites where samples were collected in multiple years (c) in a certain time range (d).

Fig. 5

Collection methods and identification precision represented in the database. Number of collected samples with different methods and the number of samples where springtails were identified to a certain taxonomic resolution level are shown with doughnut charts.