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.