Application of bioash from biofuel combustion to soil supports nutrient recycling, but may have unwanted and detrimental ecotoxicological side-effects, as the ash is a complex mixture of compounds that could affect soil invertebrates directly or through changes in their food or habitat conditions. To examine this, we performed laboratory toxicity studies of the effects of wood-ash added to an a...

The effects of eight polycyclic aromatic compounds on the survival and reproduction of the collembolan Folsomia fimetaria L. were investigated in a well-characterized Danish agricultural soil. With the exception of acridine, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and neutral N-, S-, and O-monosubstituted analogues showed similar toxicities to soil collembolans when the results were expressed i...

Competition is a major regulatory factor in population and community dynamics. Its effects can be either direct in interference competition or indirect in exploitative competition. The impact of exploitative competition on population dynamics has been extensively studied from empirical and theoretical points of view, but the consequences of interference competition remain poorly understood. Her...

Despite its significance regarding the conservation and management of biological resources, the body of theory predicting that the correlation between successive environmental states can profoundly influence extinction has not been empirically validated. Identical clonal populations from a model experimental system based on the collembolan Folsomia candida were used in the present study to inve...

Recently, we developed quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSARs) for the toxicity to Folsomia candida of eight chlorobenzenes (CB) and four chloroanilines (CA). These QSARs used freely dissolved soil interstitial water concentrations determined by solid-phase microextraction (SPME), and corresponding with the EC10 and EC50 for effects on reproduction. Chemical concentrations however...

We investigated the toxicity of soil samples derived from a former municipal landfill site in the South of the Netherlands, where a bioremediation project is running aiming at reusing the site for recreation. Both an organic soil extract and the original soil sample was investigated using the ISO standardized Folsomia soil ecotoxicological testing and gene expression analysis. The 28 day surviv...

We describe and compare the external morphology of eleven clonal strains and one sexual lineage of the globally distributed Folsomia candida, known as "standard" test Collembola. Of the 18 morphological characters studied, we measured 14 to have significant between-strains genetic variations, 9 of these had high heritabilities (>78%). The quantified morphological polymorphism was used to analys...

Alpha-cypermethrin, a synthetic pyrethroid, is used as an insecticide in agricultural settings and is increasingly replacing organophosphates and carbamates because of lower application rates and lower toxicity to mammals. Because very little is known about the acute and chronic toxicity of this compound for soil-living organisms, the present study investigated acute and sublethal toxicity of a...