Use and application of iNaturalist on land snails from Argentina

Abstract

Gastropods are a large and diverse taxonomic group, and South America has animpressive diversity of land snails. However, there are no accurate and complete listsor estimates of native species’ richness in South America. The aim of this work is toevaluate the use of iNaturalist in Argentina for terrestrial gastropods and its potentialto contribute to the knowledge of malacofauna. A search was performed forArgentina on 15 June 2024, filtering observations for terrestrial gastropods, yielding3,758 records, of which about 10% were of interest for this work. Exotic speciesrepresented between 60–63% of the observations in iNaturalist, and native speciesrepresented between 37–40%, with post-validation and pre-validation respectively.The geographical distribution of exotic species was mostly concentrated in the urbanareas of the capital cities, and the observations of native species were concentrated ina few provinces. It was possible to detect and expand the distribution area of exoticspecies such as Rumina decollata, Limacus flavus, Bradybaena similaris, Deroceraslaeve, Deroceras reticulatum, Deroceras invadens, Arion intermedius, Milax gagates,Limax maximus, Vallonia pulchella, possibly Laevicaulis alte; native species such asPhyllocaulis soleiformis, Drymaeus poecilus, Drymaeus papyraceus. Potential speciesnot recorded in Argentina were identified as Helix pomatia, Mesembrinus gereti. Wealso recorded species within the known range, potential new species not described byscience, a possible case of accidental transfer of Mesembrinus interpunctus, and theprediction of the distribution of Megalobulimus lorentzianus was verified. Throughthe development of this study, we were able to demonstrate the relevance of citizenscience in providing interesting contributions to the knowledge of terrestrialmollusks biodiversity in Argentina.