Anthropogenic impacts cause a number of global changes (GCs), including changes in climate and land use amongst others. GCs impact biodiversity, but direction and magnitude is still unclear. Soil animals are often overlooked in GC research despite being important for many essential ecosystem functions. This research, based at the University of Helsinki, will focus on earthworms. Understanding how these communities may change as a result of GCs is important for maintaining the functions they provide, such as helping in climate regulation. Using two existing global datasets, we will model how earthworm communities are changing over space and time in response to GCs. Many studies focus on the number of species, we will extend this to consider changes to the species found within communities. We have a unique opportunity as the two global datasets are at different scales, one local and one national scale. As preliminary analyses suggest results may depend on scale, we will be testing this.

2024

2028