Clive A. Edwards was appointed as Chair of the Department of Entomology at the Ohio State University in 1985. He has published extensively on soil ecology, environmental toxicology, and sustainable agriculture, and he is currently recognized as a world authority on earthworms. His book is the first comprehensive book on earthworms since Charles Darwin's The Production of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Earthworms which was published in 1881. In 1996, Professor Edwards's book Ecology of Earthworms won a Presidential Citation from the U.S. Soil & Water Conservation Society. A prolific writer, he has published 378 scientific papers including writing, editing or co-editing 30 books.

Patrick Bohlen is currently the Director of Research at the MacArthur Agro-ecology Research Center. His research focus and interests include nutrient, cycling processes, influence of agriculture on ecosystem services, affects of microbes on nutrient cycling, influence of earthworms, soil fauna on nutrient cycling, He has served on the editorial boards for "Ecology and Ecological Monographs, Applied Soil Ecology, and The Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology. He is an advisor to the World Wildlife Fund on a conservation project. He serves as a review for the National Science foundation Ecology /Ecosystems/LTREB ProgramsPaul Hendrix is a faculty member of the Conservation Ecology Program at University of Georgia, Center for Biological Diversity and Ecosystem Processes. His current NSF funded research projects focus on exotic earthworm invasion in wildland ecosystems. He has published extensively on the subjects of earthworm management, ecology, soil ecology. His publishing record features 5 books that are author/co-authored, 20 chapter contributions to edited volumes, and 78 journal articles.Norman Arancon obtained M.

S. and Ph.D. degrees in Environmental Science from The Ohio State University (OSU), Columbus, Ohio USA after an award from Fulbright and The Ohio State University in 1997 to 2001. Together with Dr. Clive Edwards and his students at the Soil Ecology Laboratory, they pioneered research on vermicompost applications in the field using other commercially important vegetables to investigate their effects on chemical and biochemical changes in soils.