First evidence for long‐term stasis in wet‐tropics land snail community composition

Abstract

While spatial turnover in species composition is well documented much less investigation has been conducted over long-time periods. Land snails provide a unique window to observe such patterns because their fossil shells not only allow for species-level identifications and quantification of abundance, but can also provide accurate radioisotope dates. Here we compare species turnover and accumulation patterns in comparable temperate (Slovakia and the Czech Republic) and tropical (Malaysian Borneo) land snail datasets. These analyses show that while temperate communities demonstrated significant compositional change over the modern to Late glacial maximum (LGM) transition, tropical communities did not.