Raheem-2014-Western Ghats Land Snails-1-294

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TROPICAL NATURAL HISTORY, SUPPLEMENT 4, NOVEMBER 2014
be made using appropriate, fine-scale maps,
but this is outside the scope of the current
work. For up-to-date information on
modern-day Indian administrative divisions
see: Know India (http://knowindia.gov.in/
default.php) and the National Portal of India
(http://india.gov.in).
In order to facilitate comparison
between the list, the FBI and other historical
literature, for some localities we have used
British colonial (anglicised) names in
preference to those officially in current use
(e.g. Bombay instead of Mumbai, Calcutta
for Kolkata, Madras for Chennai, Trivandrum
for Thiruvananthapuram). For the
same reason we usually use anglicised
names for hill or mountain ranges (e.g.
Nilgiri Hills, Anaimalai Hills). We are
aware, however, that the widespread use of
Dravidian hill names in combination with
the English word ‘hills’ is tautological – the
words ‘mala’ or ‘malai’ (e.g. Anaimalai)
and ‘giri’ (e.g. Nilgiri) signify mountain or
hill in the Dravidian languages, Kannada,
Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu (Gundert,
1872; Kittel, 1899; Gwynn, 1991; University
of Madras, 1924-1936). We also note
that it is becoming increasingly prevalent in
India to use the Dravidian name alone (e.g.
Nilgiris or Anaimalais) in preference to the
anglicised form (e.g. Nilgiri Hills or Anaimalai
Hills), although the use of the latter
still remains commonplace outside India.
Geographical Definitions
Currently, there is no single, widely-used
definition of the Western Ghats among
researchers studying the Indian biota (e.g.
see maps available at: http://indiabiodiver
sity.org/map). The term ‘Western Ghats’ as
used by us is applied in a very broad sense
and is based on Bawa et al.’s (2007) definition
of the Western Ghats hotspot (see also
Conservation International, 2009, Fig. 2).
Our use of the term differs substantially
from the more precise definition used by
ATREE (Irfan-Ullah and Davande, 2008,
Fig. 3) and that currently used by Conservation
International in the context of the
Western Ghats and Sri Lanka biodiversity
hotspot (see http://www.conservation.org/
where/priority_areas/hotspots, Fig. 3).
The Western Ghats hotspot, as recognised
by Bawa et al. (2007), extends over a
distance of about 1500 km along the main
mountain range of the Western Ghats
(between latitudes 8º 00′ N and 21º 00′ N),
from Cape Comorin (or Kanyakumari) in
Tamil Nadu, on the southern tip of India, to
the boundary between Gujarat and Maharashtra
states (Figs. 2, 4). The western
boundary of this region runs parallel to the
coastline, but between about 1 and 60 km
inland, and thus the region defined by Bawa
et al. (2007) does not include much of the
country along the western coastal margin of
the Indian Peninsula. In the south this region
encompasses the southern part of the
Mysore Plateau (sensu Schwartzberg, 1992),
and the hill ranges to the southeast and east
(Biligirirangan hills, Melagiris, and associated
ranges) – these hills extend in a northeasterly
direction from the Nilgiri Hills to
the Eastern Ghats (Fig. 5). The Bawa et al.
(2007) definition of the hotspot also
includes the isolated group of hills consisting
of the Shevaroy, Kalrayan, Pachamalai,
and Kollimalai (or Kolli) ranges (Fig. 5).
While we largely follow the definition
of Bawa et al. (2007), we treat the Western
Ghats as a biotic province that extends all
the way to the western coastline of the
Indian Peninsula. It thus includes the coastal
lowlands falling outside the western
boundary of the Bawa et al. (2007) hotspot
(Figs. 5, 6). This coastal zone contains
several localities that were explored by
malacologists during the British Period: