Springtail composition and soil chemical properties at the Saemangeum Reclaimed Land in Korea

Springtail composition and soil chemical properties at the Saemangeum Reclaimed Land in Korea

Hak-seo Kim and Kyung-Hwa PARK

Department of Biology Education, Chonbuk National University, Jeonju, 561-756, Republic of Korea

The Saemangeum is reclaimed land. It is a Korean national project to build a global city as a frontrunner of green growth. It will create 283µx of reclaimed land and a lake as large as 118µx by constructing the world's longest 33.9km sea dike connecting Gunsan and Buan on the west coast of Korea. Since Seamangum project will change in the foreshore to the land, accordingly many changes would occur in ecosystem. Collembola inhabit ordinary soils and fallen rotten leaves, but they are often found in special habitats such as caves ant or termite nests, mountain tops, polar regions and deserts. They are also common in marine and fresh water littoral habitast, occur interstitially in wet sand, on and under rocks including coral reefs, and on water surfaces. Marine Collembola are well adapted to the environment, which has high salinities and regular tide, because they have high osmolarity of haemolymph comparing with land springtails. Since the change of soil environments and plant communities gives rise to the change of species composition of animal community, the soil insects inhabiting tideland show quite different trends in species composition from those inhabiting land habitat. And the study was conducted to investigate changes of species composition and distribution patterns of collembola and soil characteristics to tidal land of Saemangeum reclamimed land from August 2013 to May 2014. We made qualitative and quantitatively collection from fourteen sites having different or similar environment. The salinity was measured in order to find environmental factor influencing. By measuring the salinity of the site, we could be able to know relationship between measured soil salinity and collected collembola. In view of the results so far obtained, species composition and distribution patterns of collembola seems to depend on salinity. While studying the coastal Collembola, we have collected several halopholous species including Oudemansia esaki and Axelsonia littoralis. Here, we describe these species with illustrations of diagnostic characters.