Madagascar's Land Mollusks

环境恶化正在迅速推动许多本土蜗牛在世界范围内灭绝。没有什么地方比马达加斯加更令人心酸了，尽管马达加斯加比得克萨斯州略小，但本土蜗牛的种类大约是整个美国大陆的三倍。 这个为期三年的关于马达加斯加陆生蜗牛的项目将（1）发现600- 1000个新物种和几个新属;（2）博物馆的数量将增加两倍（一个地段等于一个地点的一个物种）在佛罗里达自然历史博物馆超过50,000，一个前所未有的数据库，探索物种分布和丰富的模式;以及（3）使得有可能识别国内的任何马达加斯加陆生蜗牛。尽管数以千计未被发现的热带陆生蜗牛物种目前正在灭绝，没有留下化石记录，但世界范围内严重缺乏收集和记录它们的专家。该项目将通过培训一名美国博士候选人、培训两至四名美国本科生和一名马达加斯加学士后学生并为研究生院做准备，帮助缓解这一短缺。 该项目将通过及时和非常详细的方式满足这一要求，为保护做出巨大贡献。该项目将建立关键的基础设施（四轮驱动、背包和收集设备等）。让其他研究人员填补我们科学和药理学知识的空白。

Environmental degradation is rapidly driving many native land snails to extinction worldwide. Nowhere is this more poignant than in Madagascar, which, although slightly smaller than Texas, has about three times more species of native land snails than the entire continental United States. This three-year project on Madagascan land snails will (1) discover 600-1,000 new species and several new genera; (2) triple the number of museum lots (one lot equals one species from one site) in the Florida Museum of Natural History to more than 50,000, an unprecedented database for exploring patterns of species distributions and richness; and (3) make it possible to identify any Madagascan land snail in-country. Despite the fact that thousands of undiscovered tropical land-snail species are currently going extinct without leaving a fossil record, there is a severe, worldwide shortage of specialists to collect and document them. This project will help alleviate that shortage by training one American doctoral candidate, and by training and preparing for graduate school two-to-four American undergraduate students and one Malagasy post-baccalaureate student. This project will contribute strongly toward conservation by meeting that call in a timely and extremely detailed manner. This project will establish crucial infrastructure (four-wheel-drive, backpacking and collecting equipment, etc.) to allow other researchers to bridge those gaps in our scientific and pharmacological knowledge.