The emerging complexity of animal life in soil

Brent C. Emerson
Instituto de Productos Naturales y Agrobiología-CSIC, Spain (bemerson@ipna.csic.es)

Soil organisms have been estimated to represent perhaps as much as 25% of all described living species worldwide. Thus it is not surprising that soil has been referred as the poor man’s tropical rainforest, or the third frontier after oceanic abysses and tropical forest diversity.  In this talk, Brent Emerson will focus on one particular animal group that is characteristic of soils, the Collembola (springtails). The Collembola have been the subject of recent evolutionary genetic analyses that shed light on why, despite having a worldwide distribution, the class Collembola is represented by very few species, many of which have very large geographic distributions when compared to other flightless arthropod groups. Brent's research results pose a number of challenges for future investigations, and he will address how these challenges might be tackled in his talk.  

Recent publications:
Cicconardi, Fanciulli & Emerson (2013) Collembola, the biological species concept and the underestimation of global species richness. Molecular Ecology 22: 5382–96
Emerson, Cicconardi, Fanciulli & Shaw (2011) Phylogeny, phylogeography, phylobetadiversity and the molecular analysis of biological communities. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 366: 2391–402
Cicconardi, Nardi, Emerson, Frati, Fanciulli (2010) Deep phylogeographic divisions and long-term persistence of forest invertebrates (Hexapoda: Collembola) in the North-Western Mediterranean basin. Molecular Ecology 19: 386–400

Contact:  Miguel Navascués – CBGP ; Miguel.Navascues@supagro.inra.fr

Contact du Comité SEEM: seem@services.cnrs.fr.