Museum collections are largely untapped sources of key information for the conservation of invertebrate biodiversity but in many cases these data are not readily available to land managers. Meanwhile significant faunal habitats containing much of Australia’s terrestrial invertebrate biodiversity continue to disappear through habitat destruction due to the application of poor land management techniques.

The dry vine thickets of coastal and subcoastal Queensland occur as a scattered archipelago of often small, geographically isolated patches of dense scrub. Land clearing and fire management practices are having major impacts on this temporally dynamic archipelago of unique refugia and comparatively few patches remain. These thickets are not renowned for their vertebrate faunas but are inhabited by relatively diverse invertebrate communities including many undocumented land snails.

Land snails are useful environmental indicators and biodiversity predictors, and in the absence of key taxonomic data, the Queensland Museum land snail database has proved useful in highlighting the conservation values of these vine thicket ecosystems.