Ecotoxicological tests are increasingly being used to evaluate the toxicity of a substance or mixture of substances towards soil fauna. One of these uses the parthenogenetic collembolan Folsomia candida to test for soil contamination, and this has been standardised in Europe. However, in such studies, it is important to know whether different laboratories use genetically close clones. In this s...

For the elucidation of effects of a pesticide on life-cycle parameters of arthropods, applicable in the development of ecotoxicological test procedures with soil living animals, attention was drawn to body growth, which has previously been described as a sensitive parameter in Collembola. Body growth of the following three soil-dwelling arthropods was studied under the influence of dimethoate: ...

Apple replant disease (ARD) is common to all major apple-growing regions in the world. It occurs when new apple trees are replanted on sites where previously same or closely related crop species were grown. Biotic (fungi, bacteria and nematodes) abiotic soil factors (poor structure, nutrition) contribute development severity of ARD. However, aetiology ARD effects higher trophic levels still unk...

Copper oxide nanoparticles (CuO-NP) are used as an efficient alternative to conventional Cu in agriculture and might end up soils. They show a high toxicity towards cells microorganisms, but only low soil invertebrates. However, most existing ecotoxicological studies were conducted sandy reference at test concentrations ?100 mg Cu/kg soil. Therefore, there is knowledge gap concerning the effect...

Abstract. Contrary to most soils, permafrost soils have the atypical feature of being almost entirely deprived soil fauna. Abiotic constraints on fate carbon after thawing are increasingly understood, but biotic remain scarcely investigated. Incubation studies, essential estimate effects thaw cycling, typically measure consequences in isolation from topsoil and thus do not account for altered i...

Genomic studies measuring transcriptional responses to changing environments and stress currently make their way into the field of evolutionary ecology and ecotoxicology. To investigate a small to medium number of genes or to confirm large scale microarray studies, Quantitative Reverse Transcriptase PCR (RT-qPCR) can achieve high accuracy of quantification when key standards, such as normalizat...