Slugs and Snails

The Pacific Northwest is home to a huge abundance of terrestrial mollusk species, some of which are highly endemic and located in only certain small forests. When those areas might cover a section of National Forest or BLM forested land, surveys are conducted to look for presence and absence of different mollusk species. I and my coauthors have evaluated years of collected data from the Tillamook BLM to test for the influence of topography on mollusk distributions. Specifically, are certain species more likely to be found in wet areas like hollows and landslides? Are there more mollusks generally in areas that capture and hold water better?

A paper from this project has recently been published in the journal Malacologia. Below is a visual abstract, but this dataset has a lot more interesting questions that it could be used to answer about surveying protocol and terrestrial mollusk distributions.