Report on the Soil Fauna of Bhadrak and Balasore District, Orissa

Soil is one of the basic natural resources that supports life on Earth. It is a huge ecosystem, which is the habitat to several living organisms. Historically, most of the efforts on biodiversity studies focused, especially on above ground plant and animal species (Wardle, 2006). However, it is well recognized that in most terrestrial ecosystems, the below ground biota supports much greater diversity of organisms than does the above ground biota, because soils are the central organising entities in terrestrial ecosystems (Coleman, and Whitman, 2005).