What Mammaling is

Mammaling is a free citizen-science web app for recording observations of wild mammals anywhere in the world.

It works like a field notebook. You go out walking, note the mammals you come across — the animal itself, or just its tracks and signs — and save the outing with its place, its date and the effort you put in. Your personal species list grows with every new find, and those observations are released to scientific and conservation projects that need to know which mammals are out there, where, and when.

Open the app

What you can do

Record field outings with the species you saw, how many, their behaviour, your photographs and any tracks and signs you found.
Keep a life list: every new species is recorded for good, with a map of where you saw it.
Read accounts for 6,722 mammal species worldwide, covering field identification, habitat, diet, behaviour, conservation status, and illustrated plates of tracks and signs.
Explore which mammals have been recorded near any point on the planet, and find places worth going to look.
Export your data in Darwin Core, the international standard for exchanging biodiversity information.

What the data is for

Mammaling does not record isolated sightings; it records outing checklists. That difference matters. When someone states that they noted everything they saw along a route, a researcher can work out not only which species were there, but also which ones were not. That is what makes it possible to study population trends, rather than only draw distribution maps.

Observations are published under an open licence, so that any person or institution can use them with attribution to the source.

With two safeguards. Locations of species vulnerable to persecution are obscured automatically, so the app cannot serve as a map for a poacher. And every record carries the certainty of the identification: only what was identified with confidence enters the scientific datasets.

Who is behind it

Mammaling is an independent project built by Ángel Dolón Viejo, a naturalist, from Midleton (County Cork, Ireland). It belongs to no company and no institution, and it is free to use.

For anything at all: [email protected]

Data and sources

Taxonomy follows the Mammal Diversity Database of the American Society of Mammalogists. Conservation statuses come from the IUCN Red List. Maps are served with OpenStreetMap data. Species accounts are written and reviewed by the project team, with contributions from the community subject to moderation.