MammalMAP: Virtual Museum of African Mammals

This data-set comprises validated species occurrence records of Mammals on the African continent, although the bulk of the data is for South Africa, Lesotho and Eswatini (former Swaziland). The aim of MammalMAP is to update the distribution records of all African mammal species. Through collaborations with professional scientists, conservation organisations, wildlife authorities and citizen scientists across Africa, we consolidate all reliable and identifiable evidence (camera trap records, photographs) of current mammal locations into an open-access digital database. The information consolidated within MammalMAP will not only yield crucial information for species conservation policies and landscape conservation policies, but provides an excellent platform for educating the public about African mammals and their conservation challenges. MammalMAP is a Virtual Museum and citizen science project which aims to determine the distribution and conservation priorities of Mammals on the African continent. MammalMAP is building the 21st century distribution maps for Africa's Mammals. Identification of citizen science records, based on the photos uploaded, is done by a panel of experts in the relevant taxa. The taxonomy is kept up-to-date by the project coordinator. The data available to the public is the subset of shareable records (see Lineage for details), also, records for sensitive taxa are not available to the public. Records are provided at the recorded precision, usually point coordinates. However, historical records were assigned to a 15x15 minute grid (or QDS) based on the locality description when no coordinates were provided. The coverage is good for South Africa, Lesotho and Eswatini, moderate for Namibia, Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe, but very sparse for the rest of Africa.