Materials and Methods

Most of the records documented here are the result of collections made in 2003 and 2004 specifically for this Living Landscapes project; these collections are now incorporated into the Invertebrate Zoology Collection of the Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria (RBCM). At most sites, specimens were collected by hand picking from soil, leaf litter, rocks, logs and other dead wood. All slug and some snail material were drowned in water (to relax animal and extend the bodies), then preserved in 70% ethyl alcohol (EtOH). A portion of the shelled snail material was put directly into EtOH and dried later in the lab for the dry collection. At a few locations samples of leaf litter were collected for drying and sorting later. This method offers the best means to collect minute snails with the least amount of effort in the field.

Another source of new records were specimens collected in 2003 by Keary Walde during archaeological investigations. These specimens were donated to the Royal B.C. Museum.

In addition to these new collections, other records are included in this report, including earlier collected material in the RBCM collection, my personal collection (denoted by my initials, RGF), and the Canadian Museum of Nature (CMN). The latter are incorporated here when known to me, but the CMN collection was mostly unavailable for study, and in most cases, I have not verified identifications. I also give (in the Annotated Species List section) species and catalogue numbers of records of Succineidae from the Peace River - northern Rockies region that were cited by Harris & Hubricht (1982). These collections are now in the Invertebrates Collection of the Field Museum of Natural History (FMNH, Chicago, IL). I have not attempted, however, to verify their identifications.

While in the field, locality geopositions were acquired using a hand-held Garmin eTrex® Vista GPS unit. Positions were subsequently checked on National Topographic Series 1:50,000-scale paper maps or electronic versions of the same by Fugawi® or Softmap®. Some earlier museum collections lack precise position data and I estimated approximate positions for these for purposes of mapping. Elevations above sea level (abbreviated as a.s.l.) presented in the Appendix and elsewhere are approximate, having been later derived from maps, from digital elevation data, or by GPS.

All photographs were taken using a Nikon® Coolpix 950® digital camera. Figure 4 was photographed through a Russian-built compound microscope (МБС-10) manually held to one eyepiece with the camera's focus set to infinity.

This report uses the same nomenclature as appears in Land Snails of British Columbia (Forsyth 2004).

Terrestrial Gastropods ...   
Table of Contents   Next