The population of arthropods is high due to their high adaptation ability. One of the habitats of arthropods is soil. Soil arthropods are small animals such as insects, spiders, and mites. They range in size from microscopic to several inches in length. Most live near the soil surface or in the upper three inches. Arthropods improve soil quality by creating structure through burrowing, depositing fecal pellets, controlling disease-causing organisms, stimulating microbial activity, enhancing decomposition via shredding organic matter and mixing soil, and regulating healthy soil food web populations.

To identify the arthropods, there are various locations that can be explored. One of them is Taman Nasional Bali Barat or the West Bali National Park. The West Bali National Park is a unique area of which biological diversity can be explored. They are Ulil Kususiyah, Nurul Annisa, Dian Rahmawati, Elpebriany Tria, and Ratna Yunitasari, students of the Biology department, YSU Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, who joined an excursion to identify the forest soil arthropods in the national park on November 21st 2014.

The population of arthropods is high due to their high adaptation ability. By using hand collecting and toll green methods, those students conducted the identification. The hand collecting method was done by picking specimens from the soil and leaf litter. During their exploration, they found a number of specimens from classes such as Insecta, Arachnida, Diplopoda and Chilopoda. We have identified four orders for Insecta, one order for Chilopoda, one order for Diplopoda, and one order for Arachnida. “We only found a limited number of time as we were constrained by the time available to collect the specimens,” Dian said. (yuliana)