Optimizing for taxonomic coverage: a comparison of methods to recover mesofauna from soil.

Manipulating soil properties to modify the dynamics between nematodes and their natural enemies has been proposed to conserve services such as the biological control of insect pests by entomopathogenic nematodes. Many soil microarthropods including acari mites and collembola are natural enemies of nematodes; however, little is known about the naturally occurring assemblages of these two soil dwelling groups and how they might be influenced by soil conditions. A method to efficiently recover both nematodes and microarthropods from environmental samples would be helpful to characterize communities of these two groups in different habitats.