Snail faunas in the Southern Ural forests and their relations to vegetation: an analogue of the Early Holocene assemblages of Central Europe?

Abstract

A malacological study at 41 forest sites in the Southern Urals (Bashkortostan, Russia) conducted in 2007 gave the first quantitative data about land snail assemblages from this region. We explore the hypothesis that forests of this area are modern analogues of the Early Holocene forests of Central Europe. Snail species significantly accumulated towards more fertile, calcium-rich, and lowland sites; the richest faunas were in alluvial alder forests and mesic lime-maple-elm forests. Several features such as low snail species richness, predominance of generalist species with wide distributions, and broader realized niches of particular species in the Southern Ural forests relative to their niches elsewhere, corresponded to those of fossil assemblages from the Early Holocene deposits of Central Europe. Our data also suggest that the very limited species pool, results in species poor assemblages which are structured mainly by environmental filtering.