Conceived and directed by Henry W. Setzer, the African Mammal
Project (1961–1972) covered portions of 20 countries concentrated in the northern, western, and southern
regions of Africa and generated over 63,000 specimens of mammals. The geographic foundation of this
ambitious field program is documented as an annotated gazetteer that provides coordinate data for 785
cardinal collecting localities, collectors’ names and dates of collection, general ecological descriptions, and
mammalian genera obtained at each site. In georeferencing localities, emphasis was given to primary archival
sources—original specimen labels, collectors’ field journals, and contemporaneous field maps. Most localities
surveyed fell within the Northern Savanna and Southern Savanna biotic zones. The Mediterranean, Sahara
Desert, Guinea High Forest, and Southwest Arid zones were moderately sampled; the Southwest Cape and
Afromontane zones were minimally represented.
The principal inventory method applied by field teams involved multiple transect lines of snap traps, supplemented
by hunting, roost searching, mist-netting, and specimen purchasing. Total collecting effort varied
immensely among countries, from 13 days (Chad) to 770 days (South Africa), and the number of specimens
obtained was strongly correlated; length of dedicated site inventory mostly ranged from 3 to 8 days of collecting
effort per cardinal locality. The resulting 63,213 vouchers include examples of 15 orders, 47 families, and
208 genera of African mammals; Rodentia (70%) and Chiroptera (20%) are most abundantly represented.
The historical genesis of the African Mammal Project and its scientific goals as developed by H. W. Setzer are
reviewed in the introduction to the gazetteer.
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