Meeting Abstract
The University of Kansas’ Breidenthal Biological Reserve is located near Baldwin in Douglas County, Kansas. This area is wooded, specifically Eastern deciduous forest comprised mostly of oak and hickory, and is not known to have been used for farming or grazing. It is likely that the woods were logged for large Walnut and Oak trees prior to the 1960’s. This area is part of the Douglas Group of sedimentary rock which includes sandstone and shale as well as limestone (Wells and Morley 1964). The University of Kansas purchased the woods in 1965. There are no known surveys of gastropods from this site. Two separate sites were each sampled in 2007 and 2015. The sites were identified with GPS coordinates. These surveys will provide a first species list for Breidenthal, and can be used as baseline gastropod species information for wooded temperate forests within the Midwestern United States. Our estimates of snails from 2007 were 656 snails per square meter for site 1 and 1,888 snails per square meter for site 2. Site 1 is near a creek bed and Site 2 is in a wooded location. We have compared our findings to previous work at the Fitch Natural History Reservation which is also within Douglas County, Kansas where snails at wooded sites ranged from 256 – 2368 snails per square meter. In addition, our data can be used in future surveys of Kansas and surrounding areas as a comparison to other ongoing snail biodiversity research in the region.
