No abstract

Global change is affecting soil biodiversity and functioning across all terrestrial ecosystems. Still, much is unknown about how soil biodiversity and function will change in the future in response to simultaneous alterations in climate and land use, as well as other environmental drivers. It is crucial to understand the direct, indirect and interactive effects of global change drivers on soil communities and ecosystems across environmental contexts, not only today but also in the near future. This is particularly relevant for international efforts to tackle climate change like the Paris Agreement, and considering the failure to achieve the 2020 biodiversity targets, especially the target of halting soil degradation. Here, we outline the main frontiers related to soil ecology that were presented and discussed at the thematic sessions of the World Biodiversity Forum 2022 in Davos, Switzerland. We highlight multiple frontiers of knowledge associated with data integration, causal inference, soil biodiversity and function scenarios, critical soil biodiversity facets, underrepresented drivers, global collaboration, knowledge application and transdisciplinarity, as well as policy and public communication. These identified research priorities are not only of immediate interest to the scientific community but may also be considered in research priority programmes and calls for funding.

Although soil ecology has benefited from recent advances in describing soil organism trophic traits, large scale reconstruction of soil food webs is still impeded by (1) the dissemination of most data about trophic interactions and diets into distributed, heterogeneous repositories, (2) no well-established terminology for describing feeding preferences, processes, and resource types, and (3) much heterogeneity in the classification of different soil groups, or absence of such classifications. Soil trophic ecology could therefore benefit from standardisation efforts. Here, we propose the Soil Food Web Ontology as a new formal framework for representing knowledge on trophic ecology of soil organisms. This ontology captures the semantics of trophic concepts, including consumer-resource interactions, feeding preferences and processes, and provides a formalisation of trophic group definitions. The ontology can be used to add semantic annotations to trophic data, thus facilitating the integration of heterogeneous datasets. It also provides lexical resources that can support the development of information extraction tools to facilitate literature-based datasets creation. Finally, it enables automatic and consistent classification of soil organisms based on their trophic relationships. We argue that, by harmonising the terminology and underlying concepts of soil trophic ecology, our ontology allows for better use of available information on the feeding habits of soil organisms and sounder classifications, thus facilitating the reconstruction of soil food webs and making food web research more accessible, reusable and reproducible.

The genus Songius Sun & Guo in Guo et al., 2010 (Pauropoda: Pauropodidae) was established for two new species from China: Songius rugosus Sun & Guo in Guo et al., 2010 and Songius bicruris Guo & Sun in Guo et al., 2010. The manuscript was received by the journal Zoological Science on 7th April 2010 and the article is displayed on the BioOne platform with the publication date of 1st November 2010. In the same year, Yin et al. (2010) established the genus Songius Yin & Li in Yin et al., 2010 (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae: Pselaphinae).

Ten years have passed since the last checklist of Hispaniolan Chilopoda was done and the last bibliographic compendium was published. In this work we expand the former list of species and bibliography, update the taxonomic classification and provide an assessment on Chilobase records. A new intensive literature review was performed and both recent and formerly overlooked myriapodological works were included. The treatment of supraspecific taxonomic ranks was updated and follows Chilobase 2.0. This catalogue lists 4 fossil taxa as well as 24 extant species of centipedes from Hispaniola, 9 of which are endemic. For each extant species considered, there is information on Hispaniolan synonymies and geographic distribution. Included are some clarifications on synonymies and locality problems, and species with uncertain taxonomic status are indicated. Chilobase 2.0 was tested for completeness and accuracy. We propose several updates, grouped by incorrect species records, records not  backed by known literature and species not under their currently accepted synonym. We also recommend chilopodologists to maintain active collaboration and send their updates to this useful database.