Conservation planners and resource managers are concerned about ecological resilience and survival of species as climate and sea level change. The fossil record contains an excellent means to test species responses to changing conditions. This dataset utilizes molluscan faunal data extracted from a fossil database – the Paleobiology Database (PBDB; https://paleobiodb.org/classic) – for the late Pleistocene through Holocene (129,000 years before present (ybp) to present), limited to the south Florida region, as a way to address the question how many molluscan taxa survived the significant changes to Florida’s coastline over approximately the last 129,000 years. The initial PDBD download was cleaned by eliminating duplicate entries and invalid taxa. After the data cleaning and validation, 347 taxa remained (327 late Pleistocene, and 20 Holocene); of these, 314 are considered valid taxa for this study (294 late Pleistocene, 20 Holocene). The remaining 33 taxa had some uncertainty in their taxonomic standing that could not be resolved, but the names were retained for portions of the analysis. All 347 taxa were compared to databases and published lists of extant mollusks to determine which taxa have survived to the present, and if they are still found within Florida. When only the 314 valid species are examined for the late Pleistocene and Holocene, 93% of the taxa are still alive today, indicating survival throughout the last glacial cycle; 7% went extinct; and less than1% were locally extirpated. Surviving species drop to 86% and extinct species rise to 13% if the 33 uncertain taxa are included for the late Pleistocene and Holocene. If just the late Pleistocene (0.129 Ma to 0.0117 Ma) valid taxa are compared to extant fauna, 92% survived, 8% went extinct, and less than 1% were locally extirpated. These data suggest that the molluscan fauna of south Florida are relatively resilient to significant changes, information that can be of value as resource managers develop conservation plans for changing conditions. The work described here is funded by the Greater Everglades Priority Ecosystem Science program of the USGS.
