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Bellwether of the Canaries: anthropogenic effects on the land snail fauna of the Canary Islands

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Abstract

Natural areas near human-modified landscapes experience factors that may affect local biodiversity at levels commensurate with natural environmental factors. The land snails of the Canary Islands provide excellent opportunities to evaluate the importance of anthropogenic agents in mediating the diversity and distribution of species. Land snails are particularly sensitive to disturbance and are an integral part of terrestrial ecosystems. This study analyzed the distributions and abundances of terrestrial macrosnail shell assemblages at 60 localities throughout the coastal scrub biome of the Canary Islands. This was accomplished using data on natural and anthropogenic variables to assess their relative importance in governing land snail diversity. A total of 34,801 dead shells represented a diverse malacofauna with highly localized endemism. Due to uncertain species identifications, samples from the 18 sites from the two easternmost islands are described, but excluded from statistical analyses. Regression tree analysis indicated that proximity to agricultural sites was the most important predictor of species diversity. Sites with no or very little agricultural area (≤ 0.167 km2) within a 1 km radius had significantly higher richness and diversity. These results have implications for Canary Islands conservation. Protected areas that are patchworks of natural and agricultural landscapes are still subject to native biodiversity loss because of anthropogenic impacts even when the footprint of agriculture is small.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Elizabeth Bullard for assistance in the field and laboratory, as well as Elizabeth Hausner for GIS technical assistance. Special thanks go to Miguel Ibáñez and Maria R. Alonso (Universidad de La Laguna) for their assistance with species identification. This research was made possible by a Geological Society of America Graduate Student Research Grant, a Conchologists of America Academic Grant, a Society for Sedimentary Geology Student Assistance Grant, and the University of Cincinnati. Partial support for this research was provided by a grant to the Evolution of Terrestrial Ecosystems Program (ETE) at the National Museum of Natural History; NSF-DEB 1257625. This is ETE publication 351. We also thank the government of the Canary Islands for permitting our research and sample collection.

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  1. Department of Geology, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, 45221, USA

    Alexander F. Wall, Yurena Yanes, Joshua H. Miller & Arnold I. Miller

  2. Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 20013-7012, USA

    Joshua H. Miller

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  1. Alexander F. Wall
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  2. Yurena Yanes
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Correspondence to Alexander F. Wall.

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Communicated by Robert Cowie.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 3 and 4.

Table 3 Summary of measured environmental factors and the abbreviations used to encode them for analysis
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Table 4 All species are endemic to the Canary Islands except anative but not endemic, and bintroduced, cmicrosnails (species with maximum dimension < 5 mm as adults), dsemislugs
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Wall, A.F., Yanes, Y., Miller, J.H. et al. Bellwether of the Canaries: anthropogenic effects on the land snail fauna of the Canary Islands. Biodivers Conserv 27, 395–415 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-017-1443-4

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