BE-Spring: Discovering Collembola biodiversity on grasslands with emerging genomic and metagenomic tools

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Soil animal invertebrates are notoriously difficult to identify, and Collembola - springtails - are no exception. Due to those great difficulties in identifying Collembola very little is know of their basic ecology and natural history, especially at the species and community levels of organisation. The advent of DNA-based identification (barcoding and metabarcoding) promised to lift this difficulty, but it has also presented major limitations: 1) barcode databases for soil organisms are incomplete, especially in Germany, 2) studies often use different barcode regions and different primers and this decreases comparability, and 3) metabarcoding is not informative of biomass and abundance. As an answer to limited barcode availability we are creating the Springtail Genome Reference Database (SGRD) with a focus on grassland soil Collembola fauna. The SGRD will provide genome data that not only includes all standard barcodes, but also considerably increases available genomic information, including also lower-copy nuclear elements. As an answer to the problems with metabarcoding we are implementing a shotgun metagenomic tool that overcomes limitations with primer selection and biomass estimation. We will then use SGRD and metagenomics data together with the wealth of data collected in the Biodiversity Exploratories to assess the structure and functions of Collembola communities at all 150 grasslands sites . Specifically, we will evaluate 1) how land use intensity drives species abundance, richness and 2) functional trait distribution, and 3) how Collembola communities are related to other organism groups of the grassland ecosystem, including the abundance of particular fungi and plants. These activites will provide an invaluable resource for future research into the soil fauna communities of Western Europe and shed new insight into the fundamental ecology of a poorly understood group.