iMammalia is a free smartphone application with a user-friendly design, which allows you to record and share sightings of mammals or their signs and tracks quickly and easily. It includes guides to identify different species and will store all your observations so you will have a detailed record of all of your mammal sightings.
You have a great opportunity to help better our understanding of mammal habitats and distribution all across Europe.
You can become a key player in promoting the conservation of mammals and their environment.
Learn more about nature, share your knowledge with other people, and map your own mammal sightings.
Our knowledge of most mammals is still quite limited. Although there are very detailed studies on mammal biology, the information tends to concentrate on very small natural areas. It’s important to widen this very local point of view, so that we can gain more information about specific mammals in their broader environment.
We will be able to verify the information you send us with the help of experts and other members of the scientific community. This validated information will be sent to a centralized archive of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the European Food and Safety Authority (EFSA), that researchers and wildlife managers around the world can use to answer present and future research and conservation questions.
All records will be submitted to a web-platform https://european-mammals.brc.ac.uk/ where you can Log In to view your own, or all, mammal records, and see which areas or species have not yet been surveyed.
GBIF—the Global Biodiversity Information Facility—is an international network and a research foundation funded by governments around the world and aimed at providing anyone, anywhere open access to data about all types of life on the Earth.
An important part of GBIF’s mission is to promote a culture in which people recognize the benefits of publishing open-access biodiversity data, for themselves and for the broader global community.
By making your information accessible through GBIF and other biodiversity information networks, you will contribute to global knowledge about biodiversity, and also to solutions that will promote its conservation and sustainable use.
By making your information publicly available, datasets from all over the world can be combined, so researchers can work together on related tasks with a common goal.
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) provides to the European Commission and the general public independent scientific advice on food safety and risks in the food chain. EFSA will use collected information on abundance and distribution of wild mammals to assess the risk of diseases affecting wildlife, livestock, and humans.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations that leads international efforts to defeat hunger and achieve food security for all and make sure that people have regular access to enough high-quality food to lead active, healthy lives.
FAO worked together with MammalNet project to add new features to the App, to assist countries with the detection of wild boar carcasses and allowing the instantaneous reporting of carcasses, their gender and the state of decomposition.
The reporting of wild boar carcasses by hunters, hikers and others visiting wild boar habitats is extremely important for surveillance purposes to improve available information about African swine fever, a disease of domestic pigs and wild boar that is spreading at a very high pace throughout Europe.
From the App Store or Google Play search for iMammal and download the app.
When you open the application, you can select the preferred language and region from the available options, or if you prefer you can use the English version.
Photos of different species will allow you to locate easily the observed species and you can access the camera to take a picture of the species or its signs if available.
The guide will allow you to have more details about the description and distribution of each species.
You can use your mobile’s GPS to enter geographic coordinates or use the map to locate the location of your observation.
All user records will be visible on the web site for the user to examine, search and plot, and if necessary update or correct. The same login details can be used for the web site. Regional mammal experts will then review each record and accept them as correct, ask for more information, or reject them.
