In light of recent alarming trends in human population growth, climate change, and other environmental modifications, a “Warning to humanity” manifesto was published in BioScience in 2017. This call reiterated most of the ideas originally expressed by the Union of Concerned Scientists in 1992, including the fear that we are “pushing Earth's ecosystems beyond their capacities to support the web of life.” As subterranean biologists, we take this opportunity to emphasize the global importance and the conservation challenges associated with subterranean ecosystems. They likely represent the most widespread nonmarine environments on Earth, but specialized subterranean organisms remain among the least documented and studied. Largely overlooked in conservation policies, subterranean habitats play a critical role in the function of the web of life and provide important ecosystem services. We highlight the main threats to subterranean ecosystems and propose a set of effective actions to protect this globally important natural heritage.

The temporal budgets of the input, retainment and use by invertebrates of detritus and root tufts were evaluated in a short tropical limestone cave (337 m long)

The term hotspots of subterranean biodiversity has been used to define subterranean habitats with an arbitrary cutoff of twenty or more obligate stygobitic and troglobitic species. Until present, no hotspots of subterranean biodiversity had been identified in South America. Thus, the objective of this work is to present the first two hotspots of subterranean biodiversity in that continent. The two hotspots of subterranean biodiversity are the Toca do Gonçalo cave (22 spp.) and Areias cave systems (28 spp.). The cave species, some of them considered relict species, belong to the Platyhelminthes (1 sp.), Nemertea (1 sp.), Gastropoda (2 spp.), Amphipoda (2) Isopoda (7), Decapoda (1), Collembola (5), Coleoptera (5), Ensifera (1), Sternorrhyncha (1), Zygentoma (1), Diplopoda (6) Chilopoda (5) Araneae (2), Opiliones (1) Palpigradi (2), Pseudoscorpiones (4), and Osteicthyes (2). Although both caves, together, have 50 troglobitic species, only 38% of these species are formally described. Both caves have perennial water bodies, but terrestrial obligate cave invertebrates are dominant in number of species in both systems (around 77%). While the Areias system is partially contained in a conservation unit, Toca do Gonçalo cave is currently unprotected, although it certainly deserves protection.