Online-only Table 1.

Information captured in the data template relating to meta-data.

Field	Format	Information	Required field (*)
File	Text	Unique ID for each article	*
Article_Title	Text	Title of the article the data was published in. If unpublished then NA or “Unpublished”
Article_Year	Integer	The year of the article was published (NA if unpublished)
Article_FirstAuthorSurname	Text	The surname of the first author of the article	*
PaperContact_Surname	Text	The surname of the corresponding author of the article
Article_Journal	Text	The journal the article was published in (NA if unpublished)
Article_DOI	Text	The DOI of the article (NA if not available or unpublished)
Data_DOI	Text	The DOI of the data (if different from the article, NA if not available)
Number_of_Studies	Integer	The total number of studies in the file	*
Total_Number_ofSites	Integer	The total number of sites across all studies in the file	*
Total_Number_ofSpecies	Integer	The total number of species in the dataset (if given)
Entire.Community	Yes/no	Was the entire earthworm community sampled, or just selected species. If this information is unknown or unclear NA is given	*
Data.From.Paper	Yes/no	Was the data taken from the paper, or did the author provide raw values	*
Other.soil.organisms.sampled	Yes/no	Were any other soil organisms sampled at the same sites	*