Snail inventories for short-term impacts: Methodological differences and their underlying causes

To explore the underlying causes of this phenomenon, we investigated the physical and chemical resistance of the shells of eleven species under laboratory conditions and simulated shell production and degradation using a multistage population model. Contrary to expectations, our results indicated that this variation in overrepresentation was not explained by shell resistance but rather by shell size: significantly higher overrepresentation was observed in smaller species.

This relationship may be driven by the faster life cycles and higher turnover rates of smaller species, a finding corroborated by our population model. We concluded that the inclusion of empty shells can significantly distort the perception of the instantaneous state of the community and mask short-term temporal changes. We recommend prioritising live data for detecting short-term impacts and emphasising the importance of explicitly stating and justifying the chosen data type in scientific publications.