Analysis of Museum Records Highlights Unprotected Land Snail Diversity in Alabama

Abstract: In order to address the conservation status and needs of Alabama's land snail species, we examined their diversity and distribution using 11,816 museum records representing 226 land snail species. The Chao-1 statistic identified seven areas of high species richness. The areas with the highest richness contain an estimated 200 species of land snail. These seven areas are not currently well protected by state or federal lands. While taxonomic misidentification and geo-referencing quality may be inflating our results, we suggest that studies like ours provide valuable baseline diversity estimates and launching points for continued studies.