Annotated and Updated Checklist of Land and Freshwater Molluscs from Asturias (Northern Spain) with Emphasis on Parasite Transmitters and Exotic Species

Abstract

Land and freshwater molluscs are the most abundant non-arthropod invertebrates from inland habitats worldwide, playing important ecological roles and some being important pests in agriculture. However, despite their ecological, and even economic and sanitary importance, their local diversity in many European regions is not perfectly understood, with a particularly notableknowledge gap in the northern Iberian malacofauna. This work aims at providing a revised checklist of continental gastropods and bivalves from the Asturias (northern Spain), based on the examination of newly collected and deposited material and on the critical analysis of published and gray literature. A total of 165 molluscan species are recognized. Ten species constitute new records from Asturias and seven from northern Iberian Peninsula. Seventeen species are introduced or invasive, evidencing the current increase of the bioinvasion rate in continental molluscs. Furthermore, all these exotic species are parasite transmitters or trematode intermediate hosts, and thus represent a potential bio-sanitary risk for human and other animal health. The provided data strongly suggest that the increase of invasive freshwater snail species can lead to an increase in parasitic infections, and this is a crucial point that transcends the merely scientific to the political-social sphere.

Machine Learning Algorithms for the Estimation of Water Quality Parameters in Lake Llanquihue in Southern Chile

“…Population growth and the exponentially increasing use of freshwater are indispensable components of any analysis of inland aquatic systems [3][4][5]. Among the main impacts of anthropogenic activity on the biodiversity of inland aquatic ecosystems, including those in Chile, are habitat loss and degradation [6], caused mainly by transformations by agriculture [7][8][9], afforestation [10], and direct transformations of aquatic systems caused by various types of civil projects, such as irrigation [8,11,12], hydroelectricity [13], tourism [14,15], transportation infrastructure, land-use changes [9,16], the introduction of invasive and exotic species [17,18], the consequences of cascading processes of native species losses [19], and point and diffuse chemical pollution (from industrial projects and livestock activity, among other sources) [20]. The characterization of lakes in southern Chile has focused mainly on their trophic states.…”

A multi-taxa assessment of aquatic non-indigenous species introduced into Iberian freshwater and transitional waters

“…Cruz et al 2008;Ruiz-Navarro et al 2013;Romero 2015). In fact, the introduction of both animal and plant species in Iberian inland waters is a long-lasting and ongoing process, whose adverse effects have been largely documented from an ecological (Aguiar and Ferreira 2013;Anastácio et al 2019), socioeconomic (Durán et al 2012;Angulo et al 2021) and public health (Collantes et al 2015;Sánchez et al 2021) perspective. In recent years, a few studies have provided reference NIS inventories and first assessments targeting different inland ecosystems (freshwater or transitional environments) and biotic groups, at Iberian, national (Spanish or Portuguese) and regional scales.…”