About this project

About the African Small Mammals Database (ASM)

The ASM database aims to compile available georeferenced and taxonomically confirmed records of African small terrestrial mammals and provides up-to-date information on their distribution and taxonomy. Currently, the pilot project focuses on Ethiopian rodents, with plans to expand to the full African range and other taxa (e.g. shrews).

The ASM database was initiated by several research projects of the Institute of Vertebrate Biology (Czech Academy of Sciences), but evolved within a long-term collaboration between numerous international research teams. The part focused on the Ethiopian rodents involved  mainly researchers from the Mekelle University (Ethiopia), the Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute (Ethiopia), the A. N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution RAS (Russia), the University of South Bohemia (Czech Republic), Wolaita Sodo University (Ethiopia), and the University of Antwerp (Belgium).

The current database includes geographical, ecological, and actual taxonomic information for all currently recognized Ethiopian rodent species. For each taxonomic unit, all displayed data can be downloaded in CSV format using the “Download CSV” button located at the bottom of each taxonomic account. References, collectors, GenBank accession numbers, and other relevant metadata are included where available.

Do you want to contribute?

• Have you recently conducted field sampling in Ethiopia and would like to share your data?
• Are your samples reliably identified to the species level (e.g., genetic confirmation or expert morphological identification) and georeferenced?

If so, we would be glad to hear from you!

All submitted data will be reviewed and, if suitable, incorporated into the database, contributing to a better understanding of Ethiopia’s unique biodiversity. Please arrange your data according to the template provided below and save them in a standard format (such as .csv or .xlsx), and send them to asm@ivb.cz.

Download the annotated template.

Editors

Lucie Kubáčková

Josef Bryja

Getachew Mulualem

How to cite?

If you use data from the ASM database in your research, please cite it as follows:

African Small Mammals Database (ASM). Institute of Vertebrate Biology, Czech Academy of Sciences. https://asm.ivb.cz/ (accessed on: DD.MM.YYYY).