ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is a product of the iBioGen project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 810729. We are grateful to the Department of Forests -Ministry of Agriculture, Rural Development and Environment, Republic of Cyprus- for providing sampling permission and cartography of the forest habitat distributions. We would like to show our gratitude to Savvas Savva and Heriberto López for assistance in designing and building soil processing facilities at the University of Cyprus, Zoe Makridou, Loudmila J. Lagou, Stylianos Mavrianos and Andreas Dimitriou for help during sampling and sample processing, Konstantinos Ntatsopoulos for support in Coleoptera taxonomy, and Angelina Ceballos-Escalera and Elena Lugli (Natural History Museum, London) for advice during metabarcoding library preparation. We also wish to thank Centro de Supercomputación de Galicia (CESGA) for access to computer resources. V.N. was supported by a research contract under the iBioGen project and a Juan de la Cierva-Formación postdoctoral fellowship (grant FJC2018-035611-I) funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the European Regional Development Fund.