Ecological niche modeling for conservation planning of an endemic snail in the verge of becoming a pest in cardamom plantations in the Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot.

Conservation managers and policy makers are often confronted with a challenging dilemma of devising suitable strategies to maintain agricultural productivity while conserving endemic species that at the early stages of becoming pests of agricultural crops. Identification of environmental factors conducive to species range expansion for forecasting species distribution patterns will play a central role in devising management strategies to minimize the conflict between the agricultural productivity and biodiversity conservation. Here, we present results of a study that predicts the distribution of , a snail endemic to the Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot, which is becoming a pest in cardamom () plantations.