Madagascar's Land Mollusks

环境恶化正迅速导致世界范围内许多本土蜗牛灭绝。没有什么地方比马达加斯加更令人痛心的了，马达加斯加虽然比德克萨斯州略小，但它的本土蜗牛种类是整个美国大陆的三倍多。这个为期三年的马达加斯加蜗牛项目将(1)发现600- 1000个新种和几个新属；(2)将佛罗里达自然历史博物馆（Florida museum of Natural History）的标本数量（一个标本相当于一个地点的一个物种）增加两倍，达到5万多个，为探索物种分布和丰富度模式提供了前所未有的数据库；(3)使鉴定国内任何马达加斯加陆地蜗牛成为可能。尽管目前有成千上万种未被发现的热带陆地蜗牛正在灭绝，而且没有留下化石记录，但在世界范围内，收集和记录它们的专家严重短缺。该项目将通过培训一名美国博士候选人，以及培训2至4名美国本科生和一名马达加斯加学士学位后学生并为其研究生院做准备，帮助缓解这一短缺。该项目将通过及时和极其详细的方式满足这一呼吁，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），以使其他研究人员能够弥合我们在科学和药理知识方面的差距。

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.