2025-08-31
Where we talk about snails, urban landscape and climate change.
Papers
So there are some taxa who are not well researched with respect to urban biodiversity. In general, anything other than birds and plants.
Snails actually have some large datasets collected today and in the past! Some scientists (Silvertown et al) thought that one could see the impact of climate change on snails by looking at their polymorphisms (e.g., color of the shell or number of rings). Sadly, this hypothesis was disproved. On the other hand, human presence and topology of the urban environment has a lot of influence on the distribution of snails (barbato et al). Parks have proven to be island of biodiversity and distance to the center as well as distance to vegetation cover were the variables with the highest impact on biodiversity.
In that last study, Siena was found to have the richest alpha and gamma diversity. Indeed, Siena is characterized by many well preserved wooded and green patches inside the urban core and there is relatively little car traffic. So now, you should go visit Siena :).