News

The research team is made up of 70 scientists from 26 countries – Switzerland, the Netherlands, the USA, UK, Russia, Spain, Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, Italy, France, Brazil, South Africa, China, Australia, Portugal, etc.

The list of authors includes a group of nematologists from Karelia, working at the Institute of Biology KarRC RAS – Elizaveta Matveeva, Anna Sushchuk and Darya Kalinkina.

Based on the analysis of 6759 samples from all continents the project has demonstrated that nematodes, being among the most abundant animals on the planet, concentrate more at high latitudes: 38.7% of the total abundance live in boreal forests and tundra regions of North America, Scandinavia and Russia; 24.5% in temperate latitudes, and 20.5% – in tropical and subtropical regions.
The factors behind this distribution of nematodes were identified. The numbers of soil nematodes on Earth were estimated to be – 4.4±0.64×10^20, much more than previously believed. There are over 57 billion individual nematodes per human being. The total biomass of soil nematodes is 0.3 gigatons (i.e. 300 million tons), which is roughly 82% of the total human biomass on Earth.

The results of these studies can be used in predicting global organic matter cycling models with regard to current and future climate change scenarios. The authors remarked that Russian territory often appears as a ‘blank spot’ in large biogeographical studies on the distribution of various groups of organisms. It is therefore especially valuable that the gap can be filled, and contribution can be made to the understanding of the distribution patterns of soil nematodes, at least for European Russia.

Karelian scientists thank their colleagues – Thomas Crowther, Johan van den Hoogen (both from Switzerland), Stefan Geisen (Switzerland, the Netherlands) and Alexey Tiunov (Russia) – for the invitation to take part in this large-scope international research project!