Experimental evidence that even minor livestock trampling has severe effects on land snail communities in forest remnants

1. Land-use intensification is increasing dramatically in production systems world-wide. Livestock production is an important component of production land use, and increases in livestock densities have had a wide range of negative consequences. The off-site effects of livestock grazing and trampling on native vegetation adjacent to pastoral land have received less attention than on-farm effects. Moreover, where significant ecological effects of livestock spillover have been identified, the mechanistic determinants of these effects have not typically been investigated. 2. Here, we tested the mechanistic drivers of livestock trampling effects on land snail communities in forest remnants using simulated trampling under field conditions. We used a factorial combination of leaf-litter manipulation and trampling treatments to partition different causal drivers of livestock impacts on land snail communities and related them to five environmental variables that are altered by livestock. 3. We s...