Abstract
For the northernmost province of Italy, South Tyrol, a permanent biodiversity monitoring system has been set up on the initiative of the South Tyrolean provincial government and under the direction of the Institute for Alpine Environment, Eurac Research. This monitoring only serves as basic research but also intends to provide a scientific basis for political decisions, especially in with respect to spatial planning, agriculture and nature protection. The Biodiversity Monitoring South Tyrol (BMS) aims to survey species groups that react sensitively to environmental and land-use changes. For the soil survey within the BMS we aim to investigate how the different habitats differ in species composition and biodiversity living on and beneath the soil surface. Special focus is given to a range of farming systems (e.g. crop fields, apple orchards, vineyards, grasslands). Preliminary results show a change in the community composition between grassland and the more intensively used fields towards a more generalistic community composition