ABSTRACT
Background: Soil biodiversity plays important roles in nutrient recycling in both the environment and agriculture. However, they are generally understudied worldwide. To reveal the diversity of soil macrofauna in Hong Kong, here we initiated a citizen science project involving university, non-governmental organisations and secondary school students and teachers. It is envisioned that the citizen science approach used in this study could be used as a demonstration to future biodiversity sampling and monitoring studies. New information: Throughout a year of monitoring and species sampling across different localities in Hong Kong, 150 soil macrofaunal morphospecies were collected. Eighty five of them were further identified by morphology and DNA barcoding was assigned to each identified morphospecies, yielding a total of 646 DNA barcodes, with new millipede sequences deposited to the GenBank. The soil macrofauna morphospecies in Hong Kong found in this study are mainly dominated by millipedes (23 out of 150) and oligochaetes (15 out of 150). Amongst the twenty three identified millipedes, two polyxenid millipedes, Monographisqueenslandica Huynh & Veenstra, 2013 and Alloproctoidesremyi Marquet and Condé, 1950 are first recorded in Hong Kong. Information has been curated on an online platform and database (http://biodiversity.sls.cuhk.edu.hk/millipedes). A postcard summarising the findings of millipedes in Hong Kong has also been made as a souvenir and distributed to citizen participants. The identified macrofauna morphospecies and their 646 DNA barcodes in this study established a solid foundation for further research in soil biodiversity.
ABSTRACT
Three new species and one subspecies of the genus Amynthas are described from Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China: The new species are: Amynthas maximus Qiu & Dong, sp. nov. and Amynthas tortuosus Qiu & Dong, sp. nov., and Amynthas shengtangmontis Dong & Jiang, sp. nov., the subspecies is Amynthas shengtangmontis minusculus subsp. nov. All have four pairs of spermathecal pores in 5/6-8/9, which indicates that they should belong to the corticis-group. Their morphological characteristics are compared to other similar species in the corticis-group from China and other Asian countries, such as Amynthas pulvinus Sun & Jiang, 2013, Amynthas homosetus (Chen, 1938), Amynthas corticis (Kinberg, 1867), Amynthas dorsualis Sun & Qiu, 2013, and Amynthas carnosus (Goto & Hatai, 1899). In addition, the results presented are confirmed by the pairwise comparison of COI barcode sequences. The pairwise distances between each new species and the other eighteen corticis-group species are greater than 14.7% on average. Furthermore, the pairwise distance between A. shengtangmontis shengtangmontis and A. shengtangmontis minusculus is 10.7-11.4%.
