Field guides to freshwater snails

I recently submitted an application to the JRS biodiversity Foundation for a project to enhance the monitoring and understanding of African freshwater mollusk biodiversity... One of the problems we want to address, is that collection of new data for future surveys to monitor freshwater snail biodiversity, as well as the sorting of unprocessed historical samples, is hampered by  a lack of an adequate cadre of trained molluscan taxonomists.  This is partly due to an aging/retiring taxonomic capacity for freshwater molluscs. Training of a new generation of researchers and biodiversity managers is also challenging, because existing ID tools & field guides either are not available anymore or they are outdated: Most of the existing keys and identification publications were published in the period from the 1960’s to 1990’s and predate much of the efforts in molecular taxonomy, as well as some new species descriptions. Nonetheless - as a first step - we can make existing material available. Luckily, Henry Madsen recently scanned all the field guides of the former WHO Snail Identification Centre, The Danish Bilharziasis Laboratory, and uploaded them to the University of Copenhagen's web-site. These field guides to snail identification in North East Africa, East Africa, South East Africa and Central Africa have been valuable tools in determining sources of schistosomiasis infection and other snail-borne parasites, and we hope they will be useful to future researchers in the field. You can download them right here: http://ivh.ku.dk/english/research/about_parasitology_and_aquatic_diseases/parasitology-the-environments/field-guides/