Distribution of soil biodiversity groups across Europe

Soils harbor a large portion of global biodiversity, including microorganisms (e.g., bacteria), micro- (e.g., Nematoda), meso- (e.g., Collembola), and macrofauna (e.g., Oligochaeta). This high biodiversity plays critical roles driving multiple ecosystem functions and services, including climate regulation, nutrient cycling, and food production. Recent studies showed that local scale variations in soil biodiversity is of high importance for the maintenance of multifunctionality (i.e. the ability of ecosystems to simultaneously provide multiple ecosystem functions and services) in terrestrial ecosystems. Nevertheless, and with few exceptions (Orgiazzi et al., 2016), soil biodiversity data were not collected in a harmonized and standardized manner across European agroecosystems.The main aim of this study is to collect European soil biodiversity data in a standardized template, harmonize data and associated metadata to provide an overview of existing data on different biological groups.