FEIJOO, A; ZUNIGA, María C; QUINTERO, H    LAVELLE, Patrick. Relationships between land use and the earthworm communities in the basin of La Vieja river, Colombia. []. , 30, 2, pp. 1-1. ISSN 0864-0394.

In the basin of La Vieja river, Colombia, the earthworm communities were sampled from the plot to the landscape level, in order to describe and predict the conditions of the agroecosystems in six windows of 1 km , with 16 sampling points and 96 monoliths located at 200 m from each other; the method of the Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility (TSBF) Program was used in 51 farms and 24 land uses. In order to analyze the influence of the human activity the differences in abundance and number of species were evaluated at landscape level, through the correspondence analysis (CA) with the interaction of variables to find indicator species and groups of species that characterized the land uses. Thirty one earthworm species were found, belonging to four families and 12 genera, from them, 15 were native, 9 exotic and 7 unknown. The species belong to the following ecological categories: epigeal (21) and endogeal (10) and most of them (14) inhabit the 0-20 cm soil layers with an average vertical distribution at 7,5 cm of depth. The abundance values of the earthworms permitted the separation of land uses into conserved and degraded with earthworm species indicators of change. It is concluded that earthworms are stable bioindicators for monitoring human pressure due to the effect of introduction of land uses.

: Lumbricidae; multiple land use.

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