RESUMEN
Aim: Comprehensive, global information on species' occurrences is an essential biodiversity variable and central to a range of applications in ecology, evolution, biogeography and conservation. Expert range maps often represent a species' only available distributional information and play an increasing role in conservation assessments and macroecology. We provide global range maps for the native ranges of all extant mammal species harmonised to the taxonomy of the Mammal Diversity Database (MDD) mobilised from two sources, the Handbook of the Mammals of the World (HMW) and the Illustrated Checklist of the Mammals of the World (CMW). Location: Global. Taxon: All extant mammal species. Methods: Range maps were digitally interpreted, georeferenced, error-checked and subsequently taxonomically aligned between the HMW (6253 species), the CMW (6431 species) and the MDD taxonomies (6362 species). Results: Range maps can be evaluated and visualised in an online map browser at Map of Life (mol.org) and accessed for individual or batch download for non-commercial use. Main conclusion: Expert maps of species' global distributions are limited in their spatial detail and temporal specificity, but form a useful basis for broad-scale characterizations and model-based integration with other data. We provide georeferenced range maps for the native ranges of all extant mammal species as shapefiles, with species-level metadata and source information packaged together in geodatabase format. Across the three taxonomic sources our maps entail, there are 1784 taxonomic name differences compared to the maps currently available on the IUCN Red List website. The expert maps provided here are harmonised to the MDD taxonomic authority and linked to a community of online tools that will enable transparent future updates and version control.
RESUMEN
Rodents form a vital component of Free State ecosystems and monitoring them may be a relatively quick and inexpensive method of indicating healthy or unhealthy ecosystem functioning. Using removal trapping, we have studied rodent seasonal abundance, species richness, Shannon diversity, and evenness of rodents in four habitats in the Tussen-die-Riviere Nature Reserve, inspected the most successful sampling method for these habitats, and report on their community structure and how it is related to an Ecological Index (â EI value of grassland). Both species richness and Shannon diversity increased significantly with EI value. The indicator species Mastomys coucha occurred at all plots, but contributed the largest proportion of the total captures (ca. 80%) at the plot with lowest EI value. Other results important for small mammal monitoring and collecting are that trap success and species richness was highest in autumn. This study also confirms that four days and nights continuous trapping is essential for the effective sampling of rodent communities in Free State grasslands. Our results partially support expectations that the number of specialist species increases with succession, M. coucha dominance acts as an indicator of habitat disturbance, rodent species richness conforms to Tilman's hump-shaped curve model, and adds to a baseline of diversity indices in a variety of grassland habitats.
