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- Author or Editor: P. Sólymos x
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The importance of accurate species databases is debated in the recent literature of biodiversity assessment, considering that limited resources for conservation could be better allocated to assessment based on cost effective biodiversity features. I aimed to provide an understanding of sampling bias and provide practical advice to minimize bias either before or after data collection. I used 10×10 km 2 UTM grid data for 121 land snail species to account for geographic and taxonomic sampling bias in Hungary. Sampling intensity corrected for species richness varied significantly among regions, although regions were not good predictors of sampling intensity. Residuals were significantly autocorrelated in 15 km distance, indicating small scale heterogeneity in sampling intensity compared to species richness. Sampling coverage and intensity were higher close to human settlements and sampling intensity was higher within protected areas than outside. Commonness of species was positively associated with sampling intensity, while some rare species were over-represented in the records. Sampling intensity of microsnails (<3 mm) was significantly lower than that of the more detectable large species (>15 mm). Systematic effects of the collecting methods used in malacological research may be responsible for these differences. Understanding causes of sampling bias may help to reduce its effects in ecological, biogeographical and conservation biological applications, and help to guide future research.
The ‘mefa’ package contains functions to create ad manage objects combining basic faunistic (sample/species/cont or cross-tabulated) count date and sample/species attribute tables. Segments within the count data and samples with zero count can be indicated and used in subsequent operations. Reports can be generated in plain text or LaTeX format.
We determined microhabitat associations for 39 land snail species based on multimodel inference and generalized linear mixed models using a comprehensive and micro-scale data set from the Aggtelek Karst Area, Hungary. Patterns of microhabitat associations were highly nested among microhabitat types (litter, live trees, dead wood, rock) with high number of specialist species in dead wood and in rock microhabitats. Species composition was highly predictable in these microhabitats as opposed to live tree and litter faunas. Species richness was affected by microhabitat, topographic factors and local moisture conditions. Species richness in dead wood and rock microhabitats remained high irrespective of the topographic effects as opposed to litter and live tree microhabitats, where richness decreased with drier microhabitat conditions due to topography. Our results imply that consideration of topographic factors and microhabitat quality as part of coarse filter conservation measures could be beneficial to local land snail populations in the face of changing climate and disturbance regimes.
