Contributions to Zoology, 80 (1) 1-15 (2011)

Since Solem’s provocative claim in the early 1980s that land snails in tropical forests are neither abundant nor diverse, at least 30 quantitative-ecological papers on tropical land snail commu-nities have appeared. Jointly, these papers have shown that site diversity is, in fact, high in tropical forests; often more than 100 species have been recorded per site, which is somewhat more than normally found at sites in higher latitudes. At the same time, however, point diversities (which usually range between 10 and 30 species per quadrat) appear to be no different from the ones recorded for temperate localities, which suggests that the number of ways in which syntopic resource space can be subdi-vided among different land snail species has an upper limit that is no higher under tropical conditions. The available data do not allow much analysis of the ecological structuring processes o