We compared ground beetle communities sampled from olive plantations, characterized by three types of soil management (i.e. the treatment) (Table 1). In the following the site code comes from the territorial location name of olive plantations (i.e. REN from Rende, TER from Terranova di Sibari and MIR from Mirto), so that a direct geographically based classification is intuitively given. Sample sites were (i) those periodically undergoing mechanical soil tillage (which, in the following, are called tilled sites with the code REN1-REN4; (ii) those characterized by cover crop of spontaneous herbaceous vegetation only under tree rows, with the rest of the soil tilled (half-cropland sites TER1-TER6); and (iii) those counted as no-treatment sites because entirely covered with spontaneous herbaceous vegetation, even if mowed in spring (cover-cropped sites REN5, REN6, REN7, TER7, MIR1, MIR2 and MIR4).