This project will digitize and publish around 30,000 data records of freshwater snails from existing voucher collections of the National Museums of Kenya and other research institutions. Snail data from literature will also be retrieved and published through GBIF.org. Records will be mobilized from checklists, specimen and ecological datasets.
Published data will be used to map species distributions and priority areas for the conservation of endemic and threatened snails, and will contribute to developing national conservation priorities.
Project Progress
The project is mining data from the collections of National Museums of Kenya, various literature sources and collections owned by other institutions.
So far, data mining has yielded 38,286 specimens from 26 freshwater snail species. 70% of these data were already entered in an electronic database.
At the end of the project, a total of 57 species was mobilized from 38,236 individuals of freshwater snails (Gastropods). Two species of bivalves were included in the database mainly due to their conservation status. The electronic database was published on GBIF as well as the project's checklists.
While the majority of the species were listed as Least Concern in the IUCN category, at least 4 species were listed Critically Endangered and 4 others Endangered in the IUCN Red List of Threatened animals. Also, 18 of the recorded species were endemic to Kenya.
Two workshops were held during the project. The first one were held from the 5th to the 7th of July, 2017 on The State of Environment Report (SoE) 2015-17, a drafting workshop in Naivasha, Kenya. The second one was a GBIF supported freshwater snails data mobilization workshop at the National Museums of Kenya on the 29th of August, 2017.
The project has contributed to promote the understanding and management of potential snail-borne diseases in Kenya through the knowledge on the distribution of the potential intermediate host snails in the genera Bulinus and Biomphalaria.
