The species is endemic to Indonesia, and it is found exclusively in dense vegetation in wet areas of Sulawesi and nearby Buton.

Although protected under Indonesian law since 1972, the rail is threatened by habitat loss (even within nature reserves), hunting for food and predation by introduced species; it is therefore evaluated as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List.

[2] The snoring rail was first classified as Rallus plateni by German ornithologist August Wilhelm Heinrich Blasius in 1886,[2] but was moved to its current monotypic genus Aramidopsis by English zoologist Richard Bowdler Sharpe in 1893.

Although the rail shares the origin of its name with the South American Aramides species,[6] its distinctive bill, thick legs and barred lower belly distinguish it from that group.

[7] The species name plateni commemorates Carl Constantin Platen, a German doctor who collected birds and butterflies in the Malay Archipelago[8] and gave Blasius his specimen of the rail.

The female is similar but has a brighter hindneck colour, less white on the chin, a red iris, a cream and reddish bill and blue-grey legs.

[11] The species is an uncommon Indonesian endemic of lowland and hill forests in northern, north central and southeastern Sulawesi.

A few birds were shot by Platen and another expedition led by Paul Sarasin and his second cousin, Fritz, between 1893 and 1898,[13] but the rail was then not seen for more than thirty years until Heinrich found it almost at the end of a two-year survey of Sulawesi, then known as Celebes.

[14] More than a decade later, Dutch ornithologist Louis Coomans de Ruiter also took a year to find the rail, despite concentrating on known suitable habitat.

Its numbers are thought to be decreasing, and its restricted range and small population mean that the species is classified as Vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).