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You are warmly invited to attend our upcoming earthworm surveying afternoon on Thursday 13th November at 13:00.
Described as "nature's ploughs" by Charles Darwin, earthworms play a vital role in developing a healthy soil structure and cycling nutrients. Out of an estimated 3000 species to be found globally, on mainland Britain we are thought to have 29, each of which exhibits particular behaviours and plays a different role in the ecosystem.
During this event we'll be looking for the 12 most common earthworm species. We'll see how many of them we can find across the two high-resolution Nature Sense ecological monitoring sites currently being set up on the University of Sussex campus. These sites are part of a regional initiative, and your observations will feed into a large dataset helping researchers track the impacts of land use and climate change on our regional ecosystem. After this event, you'll never look at an earthworm in the same way again.
If you are interested in getting involved, please email James at J.D.Whitehead@sussex.ac.uk