With so much land, how do we know where the animals are, and how many there are? Why would we even want to know about the numbers of animals and their patterns across the world? Well, for example, we may want to know where to create nature reserves to protect the most species. That is an area so huge that it is hard to imagine. There is around 150 million km 2 of land on earth. ![]() If we want to protect earthworms and the services they provide, these global maps of earthworms are important because we need to understand where they are and why they live there. Earthworms provide humans with many useful services, such as moving the soils and improving their quality, which can increase the amount of food that is grown. We decided to create global maps of earthworm species richness. However, until recently, we did not understand such global patterns for many organisms living in the soil. For most of the aboveground groups, the highest numbers of species occur in the tropics and numbers decrease toward the poles. So, they made maps of the world showing these patterns. ![]() For decades, scientists have known where the highest numbers of species that live aboveground are found.
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