Several years ago, on a forested part of the Georgian Court College campus in the New Jersey Pinelands, investigators found an abnormally high density of terrestrial gastropods, including three European gastropod species, two of which (Discus rotundatus and Oxychilus alliarius) were not previously reported in New Jersey. The exotic species dominated the gastropod portion of the community. I sampled the vegetation in this community to determine if the species diversity was similar to that of other Pinelands communities, and if there were species of European origin with which the snails may have arrived, as hypothesized by the investigators who studied the gastropods. The plant community was dominated in richness and abundance by New Jersey Pinelands species in both overstory and understory layers. Tree species richness was relatively high for a Pinelands community, but there were few members of tree species native to Europe and they were small in size and number. The understory also contained some individuals of a few species that were of European origin. However, parts of the campus about 0.5km away contain large numbers of 7 tree species native to Europe that were planted around 1900. The exotic snail species may have arrived with those trees and migrated to their current location. They have come to dominate the forest gastropods despite the mostly native composition of the forest vegetation.

Key words: exotic species, forest, gastropods, New Jersey, Pinelands, species diversity