Vounatsi, M., Lhoumeau, S., Moura, N. B., Ponte, M., Abreu, R., & Borges, P. A. V. (2026). Monitoring arthropods under the scope of LIFE SNAILS project -Part II. Version 1.0. Universidade dos Açores. Samplingevent dataset. https://ipt.gbif.pt/ipt/resource?r=life_snails_part2&v=1.0
The present data were collected under the project LIFE SNAILS. The project’s purpose is to protect the endemic terrestrial snails of Santa Maria, (Oxychilus agostinhoi and Leptaxis minor) and endemic semislug Plutonia angulosa and their habitats. In this study, we collected samples from SLAM (Sea, Land, Air, Malaise) traps from 11 sites of mixed forest of Santa Maria from June 2024 to December 2025. In the last season, (Autumnn 2025) there were added two more sites which are considered of high value to Azorina brevispira, which even though it is not part of the initially included endemic mollusks, is nonetheless a very important endemic species of Santa Maria.While collecting samples from various habitats every season, we enhanced the baseline data of the project that was collected in 2022. In this study, we sampled 55 times. Each sample represents one season, meaning that the trap was collected every three months. In total, we retrieved 20273 specimens that we were able to identify to a level of Order, Family, Genus, Species or Subspecies, 15046 out of those assigned to Species or Subspecies (74.21%). We made 1928 observations that were assigned to morphospecies codes, 1705 out of those were assigned to species or subspecies (88,4%). We were able to identify 172 unique species and subspecies. 27 species were endemic, 48 were native non-endemic, 77 were introduced and 20 were of indeterminate colonization status. Moreover, we calculated the Biotic Integrity Index (Tsafack et al., 2023) to assess the habitat quality of the sampled sites, which directly contributes to the goals of the LIFE SNAILS project and achieves one of the most important purposes of this sampling.
