Photo by Miguel Vieira, Flickr Creative Commons

Big Trees: A Bank for Soil Bugs

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Legacy trees, old-growth trees left standing in second-growth redwood forests, could serve as a habitat refuge for terrestrial microarthropods, miniscule bugs that live in the forest floor and maintain healthy soils, not to be confused with the bigger arthropods like spiders and bees. Dr. Michael Camann, Karen Lamoncha and Laura Hagenhauer have found substantially more and a wider variety of the soil bugs underneath these so-called legacy trees than beneath surrounding second-growth trees. Learn more about this research.