Despite their recognized essential role in soil, earthworms in tropical environments are still understudied. The aim of this study was to re-evaluate the diversity at the regional scale, as well as to investigate the environmental and spatial drivers of earthworm communities. We sampled earthworm communities across a range of habitats at six localities in French Guiana using three different sampling methods. We generated 1675 DNA barcodes and combined them with data from a previous study. Together, all sequences clustered into 119 MOTUs which were used as proxy to assess species richness. Only two MOTUs were common between the six localities and 20.2% were singletons, showing very high regional species richness and a high number of rare species. A canonical redundancy analysis was used to identify key drivers of the earthworm community composition. The RDA results and beta-diversity calculations both show strong species turnover and a strong spatial effect, resulting from dispersal limitations that are responsible for the current community composition. Sampling in different microhabitats allowed the discovery of 23 MOTUs that are exclusively found in decaying trunks and epiphytes, highlighting hidden diversity of earthworms outside of soil.

尽管their在土壤中发挥着重要作用，但对热带环境中的worm的研究仍很少。这项研究的目的是在区域范围内重新评估多样性，并研究earth群落的环境和空间驱动因素。我们使用三种不同的采样方法在法属圭亚那的六个地区的一系列栖息地中对earth群落进行了采样。我们生成了1675个DNA条形码，并将其与先前研究的数据结合在一起。在一起，所有序列聚集成119个MOTU，用作评估物种丰富度的代理。六个地区之间只有两个MOTU是共有的，单例的占20.2％，显示出很高的区域物种丰富度和大量的稀有物种。使用规范冗余分析来确定worm群落组成的关键驱动因素。RDA结果和beta多样性计算都显示出强大的物种更新和强大的空间效应，这是由造成当前群落组成的扩散限制所致。通过在不同的微生境中采样，可以发现仅在腐烂的树干和附生植物中发现的23个MOTU，这突显了hidden在土壤外部的隐藏多样性。