ABSTRACT Soil invertebrates are studied by a number of methods. Here we used zoological methods (soil sampling, pitfall trapping, litter sifting, and hand collecting) to sample centipede communities in four floodplain forests (Czech Republic, Europe) and compared the efficiency of these methods. Heat-extraction from soil samples was the most effective, followed by pitfall trapping. The centipedes found by us can be divided into five ecological groups: 1) larger, abundant lithobiomorphs, 2) larger, scarcer lithobiomorphs, 3) smaller, soil lithobiomorphs, 4) abundant geophilomorphs, and 5) scarcer geophilomorphs.