Data from: Recommendations for assessing earthworm populations in Brazilian ecosystems

<p><strong>Earthworms are often related to fertile soils and frequently used as environmental quality indicators. However, to optimize their use as bioindicators, their populations must be evaluated together with environmental and anthropogenic variables regulating earthworm communities. In this review we identify the earthworm, soil chemical, physical, environmental and management-related variables evaluated in 124 published studies that quantified earthworm abundance (&gt;7300 samples) in 765 sites with different types of climate, soils, land use and management systems in Brazil. Most soil chemical and physical attributes (except pH) were less reported (&lt;50% of studies) than other environmental variables such as sampling date, altitude, temperature, precipitation, climate and soil type and land use (all &gt;50% of studies). Earthworms were rarely identified (24%) and few studies (31%) measured their biomass, although most provided adequate information on sampling protocol. Based on the importance in regulating earthworm populations, we propose a set of variables that should be evaluated when studying earthworm communities </strong>and other macrofauna groups<strong>. This should help guide future studies on earthworms in Brazil and other countries, optimize data collection and replicability, allow comparisons between different studies and promote the use of earthworms as soil quality bioindicators.</strong></p>