A free citizen-science app about the world's mammals. You record the ones you see, keep track of the species you have found, and that data helps us understand and protect wildlife.
It does two things at once: it is your own sightings diary and life list, and it contributes real data to science. Every observation you record helps show where each species lives and how it is faring.
No. Recording observations, reading the species accounts and the articles, and using the maps are free — and there is no advertising, which is a decision rather than a stage.
It is funded by voluntary subscriptions. Subscribers get conveniences — more AI identifications per month, no per-species photo cap, the ability to start conversations — and help pay for the servers and the expeditions. Nothing that carries scientific value sits behind a paywall.
Not at all. Most people who use apps like this are amateurs. If you have watched a fox cross the road, you already have an observation worth contributing.
The app helps: once you set the location it shows you the species likely to be in the area, colour-coded by how common they are there.
Mammaling installs as an app on your phone and opens with no connection. Saving a checklist or searching for a place needs coverage at some point, so if you are heading somewhere without a signal, take notes and record when you get back.
You can also download a field pack for a country before you go: the species accounts and photographs are stored on your phone so you can consult them with no coverage at all.
An outing. Instead of noting isolated animals, you group everything you saw in one place over one stretch of time: where you were, how long for, how far you walked and how many of you there were.
That context is what turns a sighting into a scientific record. Knowing you saw three roe deer in two hours says far more than knowing you saw three roe deer.
One where you noted every mammal you identified, not only the rare or the photogenic ones.
Complete checklists are worth much more to science, because absences carry information too: if nobody is seeing rabbits in an area where they used to be everywhere, that is a signal.
Record what you do know for certain. An honest, imprecise record beats a specific, invented one.
You can upload the photograph and describe what you saw in the notes: the community and the moderators usually lend a hand with the identification.
Mammaling records animals in the wild. Captive, domestic and farm animals are not part of the scientific dataset; if you record one, mark it as such so it is clear.
An escaped animal living free does count, but say so: those cases are interesting and worth labelling properly.
Yes. When you add a species you choose the type of evidence: seen alive, sign, track, dropping, roadkill, camera trap, and so on. It all counts — and with mammals, tracks and signs are often the only evidence you get.
No. Whoever makes the checklist can add their companions by @username, and the checklist appears on everyone's profile, counting towards all your life lists. The observation counts once for science, as it should.
Yes — any checklist can be edited in full: location, date, time, effort, companions, and the species with all their details. Go to your list, open the checklist and press edit.
You decide, checklist by checklist. There are three levels:
You can also set your whole profile to anonymous or private.
It is, which is why Mammaling automatically obscures the location of species vulnerable to poaching and collecting, even if you marked the checklist public. That protection cannot be turned off.
Publishing the exact coordinates of a lynx or a pangolin can cost the animal its life.
A shared observation site: a national park, a lagoon, a viewpoint. Rather than everyone writing the place name their own way, everybody uses the same one — so the records can be pooled and you can see which species have been reported there.
You can propose new hotspots; a moderator reviews them before they appear for everyone.
Yes, with no small print: you keep ownership of every image. You authorise us to display them inside the app and to use them to promote it, always crediting you.
All photographs are published under one licence, CC BY-NC: others may reuse them with credit to you, but nobody may sell them or make money from them without your permission.
There is nothing to configure. If there is a photograph you would rather not publish on those terms, don't upload it: the observation is recorded all the same and counts exactly as much for your life list and for science. Photographs are a bonus, never a requirement.
Because an archive with a single licence is genuinely usable. Somebody looking for a photograph of a mammal for school work, a guide or a conservation article knows instantly what they may do with it, without checking permissions one by one.
CC BY-NC is the right point: it allows every use that gives the project its purpose, and blocks the one that actually bothers a photographer — somebody else profiting from their work.
And you always keep the simplest decision of all: if you would rather not publish a photograph on those terms, don't upload it.
Whenever you like. Deleting a photograph does not delete the observation: the scientific record stays, the image goes.
Only if they breach the rules: other people's content, animal cruelty, or unrelated material. If that happens you will get a message explaining why. Nothing is deleted quietly.
It helps; it does not decide. There are two kinds of help, and one of them sends your photograph to a third party — worth knowing which is which.
The first ranks the possible species by where and when you are, using public records for the area. It never looks at the photograph. There is also an image-recognition model that runs inside your own browser: it looks at the photograph on your device and nothing is uploaded.
The second is a separate, clearly labelled button. If you press it, the photograph is sent to a Google AI service to rank the candidates. It goes reduced and stripped of metadata, with the country and the month — never your exact coordinates. The privacy policy sets out exactly what is sent and what is not.
The species that ends up recorded is always the one you choose. This data reaches scientific repositories, and an identification filled in by a machine and never checked is the kind of error nobody catches afterwards.
Mammals are far more poorly documented than birds: they are elusive, many are nocturnal, and there are few systematic observers. Basic data on where each species lives is simply missing.
Your observations feed distribution maps, trend analyses and conservation studies, and they are shared with open scientific repositories such as GBIF, used by researchers worldwide.
Yes. Every species carries a rarity indicator for the area, based on real presence data. If you record something very improbable for where you are, the observation is set aside from the scientific dataset and a moderator for the region gets in touch.
It is not discarded: it is kept with its context and stays on your personal list. An escaped animal or an individual out of range are real, interesting cases, and losing them would be a mistake.
Your profile, your messages and your photographs are deleted. The observation data remains, anonymously, detached from you.
This is standard practice in biodiversity repositories: once a record has been used in research, withdrawing it would break those analyses. We say so plainly from the start so nobody gets a surprise. The full detail is on the account deletion page.
The list of every different species you have seen in your life. Each new species adds one, and only one: the second fox you see is still the same box ticked.
A species you saw for the very first time in your life on a given trip. If you had already seen it somewhere else before, it still counts as a species on the trip, but not as a mambo — which is why the number on a trip report is usually smaller than the species count.
There are three families. Milestones go by total species count. Group medals reward knowing one family well — cats, cetaceans, bats — with bronze, silver and gold levels scaled to the real size of each group. And challenges depend not on how many species you have, but on how you observe: countries visited, checklists submitted, threatened species, distinct places.
In Profile → Settings you can change the app's language, choose whether you see species names in English, in Spanish or both, and switch between the teaching and the scientific classification.
Question not here? Write to [email protected]. The ones that come up repeatedly end up on this page.