Although scientific literature focuses mainly on earthworms, all soil macroinvertebrates play an important role in modifying the architecture of the soil pore space and, in turn, in soil functions. Notwithstanding the fact that non-invasive technology, such as X-ray tomography, has long been used to differentiate non-biopores from biopores, it is still difficult to distinguish the specific contribution different macroinvertebrates make to the soil biopore system. Unlike the object-based image analysis approach, when applied to a soil pore system, mathematical morphology permits the user to obtain a very accurate pore size distribution consistent with the physical principle of water retention. The aim of this work was to evaluate the potential of the parameters of this kind of biopore size distribution to differentiate between the burrows of five different macroinvertebrate groups, namely Earthworms, Millipedes juliform, Centipedes, Campodeiform larvae and Elateriform larvae, inoculated into repacked soil mesocosms and incubated (14 days) in the field from where the soil animals were originally collected.

A two-fold approach was proposed in this work so as to obtain parameters by both pore size population distributions and Weibull modelling of the cumulative distributions. Then a predictive discriminant analysis was performed on selected parameters by using macroinvertebrate groups as grouping variables and a very good prediction was obtained in both cases. The most useful parameters were the skewness and FFT indices in the first case and the shape parameter α of the Weibull model along with its RMSE in the second one. In addition, topological characterization was performed on gallery-shaped biopores. Vertical deviation was the only parameter that was independent of the individual body size and showed the statistically significant lowest value for the earthworms. The experiment and analyses performed in this work to explore the connection between macroinvertebrate groups and the corresponding biopore size distributions may represent a suitable methodological approach to performing a general investigation into the relationships between soil management and its impact on the system of soil macropores.

尽管科学文献主要关注蚯蚓，但所有土壤大型无脊椎动物都在改变土壤孔隙空间的结构以及土壤功能方面发挥着重要作用。尽管 X 射线断层扫描等非侵入性技术长期以来被用于区分非生物孔和生物孔，但仍然难以区分不同大型无脊椎动物对土壤生物孔系统的具体贡献。与基于对象的图像分析方法不同，当应用于土壤孔隙系统时，数学形态学允许用户获得与保水物理原理一致的非常准确的孔径分布。

在这项工作中提出了一种双重方法，以便通过孔径总体分布和累积分布的威布尔模型获得参数。然后通过使用大型无脊椎动物群作为分组变量对选定的参数进行预测判别分析，在两种情况下都获得了非常好的预测。最有用的参数是第一种情况下的偏度和 FFT 指数以及威布尔模型的形状参数 α 及其在第二种情况下的 RMSE。此外，对画廊形状的生物孔进行了拓扑表征。垂直偏差是唯一独立于个体体型的参数，并且显示了蚯蚓的统计显着最低值。