The terrestrial mammals of Mozambique : Integrating dispersed biodiversity data

Despite being one of the most studied groups, comprehensive knowledge on mammals’ occurrence and their conservation status is still lacking. This is especially true in scientifically overlooked countries such as Mozambique (Amano & Sutherland 2013; Amori et al. 2012). Mozambique holds a rich although poorly known biodiversity (e.g. Dalquest 1965; Monadjem et al. 2010). Information on mammal occurrence and their conservation status in the country is particularly scarce and the only comprehensive ‘atlas’ regarding the mammal fauna of the country was published 42 years ago by Smithers and Tello (1976). The authors state that their work includes ‘a limited amount of data’ and the information regarding the species occurring in the northern provinces is incomplete. The lack of knowledge on Mozambique’s biodiversity is partially explained by the country’s political instability over the last decades. The War of Independence (1964–1974), and especially the civil war (1978–1992) seriously affected wildlife, even inside protected areas (Hatton, Couto & Oglethorpe 2001), hindering biodiversity studies in the country and blocking the documentation of Mozambican fauna. The repercussions for large mammals have been disastrous and include the local extinction of buffalo, hippopotamus and several antelope populations (Hatton et al. 2001). With the advent of peace, new efforts are being made by local authorities to conserve the country’s biodiversity, resulting in new policy guidelines, the reopening of protected areas and the implementation of new monitoring actions (e.g. Agreco 2008). However, the lack of updated data on the diversity and distribution of Mozambican fauna still impedes the development of certain conservation actions and policies, as these strongly rely on reliable data to be effectively implemented. This problem is particularly difficult to overcome, as most of the available data on Mozambique’s biodiversity dates to the colonial era (which ended in 1975), and it is scattered in foreign museums and institutions. Consequently, access to the data (especially old bibliography and specimens collected in the late 19th to early 20th century) is challenging, both for researchers and for local authorities. Background: The most comprehensive synopsis of the mammal fauna of Mozambique was published in 1976, listing 190 species of terrestrial mammals. Up-to-date knowledge of the country’s biodiversity is crucial to establish the baseline information needed for conservation and management actions.


Introduction
Despite being one of the most studied groups, comprehensive knowledge on mammals' occurrence and their conservation status is still lacking.This is especially true in scientifically overlooked countries such as Mozambique (Amano & Sutherland 2013;Amori et al. 2012).Mozambique holds a rich although poorly known biodiversity (e.g.Dalquest 1965;Monadjem et al. 2010).Information on mammal occurrence and their conservation status in the country is particularly scarce and the only comprehensive 'atlas' regarding the mammal fauna of the country was published 42 years ago by Smithers and Tello (1976).The authors state that their work includes 'a limited amount of data' and the information regarding the species occurring in the northern provinces is incomplete.The lack of knowledge on Mozambique's biodiversity is partially explained by the country's political instability over the last decades.The War of Independence (1964)(1965)(1966)(1967)(1968)(1969)(1970)(1971)(1972)(1973)(1974), and especially the civil war (1978)(1979)(1980)(1981)(1982)(1983)(1984)(1985)(1986)(1987)(1988)(1989)(1990)(1991)(1992) seriously affected wildlife, even inside protected areas (Hatton, Couto & Oglethorpe 2001), hindering biodiversity studies in the country and blocking the documentation of Mozambican fauna.The repercussions for large mammals have been disastrous and include the local extinction of buffalo, hippopotamus and several antelope populations (Hatton et al. 2001).With the advent of peace, new efforts are being made by local authorities to conserve the country's biodiversity, resulting in new policy guidelines, the reopening of protected areas and the implementation of new monitoring actions (e.g.Agreco 2008).However, the lack of updated data on the diversity and distribution of Mozambican fauna still impedes the development of certain conservation actions and policies, as these strongly rely on reliable data to be effectively implemented.This problem is particularly difficult to overcome, as most of the available data on Mozambique's biodiversity dates to the colonial era (which ended in 1975), and it is scattered in foreign museums and institutions.Consequently, access to the data (especially old bibliography and specimens collected in the late 19th to early 20th century) is challenging, both for researchers and for local authorities.

Brief history of mammal studies in Mozambique
During the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, scientific expeditions to Mozambique gathered important mammal collections presently held by European and North American museums.Because of their crucial contribution to the survey of Mozambique's biodiversity, some of these expeditions are worthy of mention.Wilhelm Peters visited the country in the mid-19th century (1842-1848) and, as a result of his work, several species new to science were described, along with the first records of species for the country (Peters 1852).Most of the specimens collected during W. Peters's expedition are currently held at the Museum für Naturkunde, previously called Berlin Zoological Museum (ZMB) Germany.Later, in the beginning of the 20th century, for the Rudd Exploration of South Africa expedition, C. Grant collected 129 specimens of 29 mammal species from Central and South Mozambique (Thomas & Wroughton 1908).Arthur Loveridge in his fifth expedition to East Africa (1948-1949) revisited the collection locality by W. Peters, Tete (Central Mozambique), and collected 11 mammal species.Portuguese zoological expeditions (Missão Zoológica de Moçambique) in 1948 and 1955, coordinated by Fernando Frade, resulted in Mozambique's most significant vertebrate collection currently held by a Portuguese institution, the Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, University of Lisbon (IICT-UL).The published catalogue of this collection indicates a total of 250 specimens representing 57 species and subspecies (Frade & Silva 1981).In 1965, an expedition sponsored by Jerry Vinson to the Zinave hunting camp, near the Save River (Central Mozambique), resulted in the collection of 54 species of mammals and the description of two bat species new to science (Dalquest 1965).Later, in 1968, a second expedition promoted by the same sponsor to Panzila (Central Mozambique) resulted in the collection of 47 mammal species (Dalquest 1968).Around the same time (1961)(1962)(1963)(1964)(1965)(1966)(1967)(1968)(1969)(1970)(1971)(1972), the Smithsonian Institution supported a project specifically targeted at surveying southern African mammals, the African Mammal Project (AMP; Schmidt, Ludwig & Carleton 2008).Coordinated by H.W. Setzer, this project included an eight-month field survey covering most of Central and South Mozambique.This expedition resulted in a valuable collection of over 3500 specimens, mainly comprising small mammals and most of which are housed at the National Museum of Natural History (USNM), Washington, DC.In 1968, R. van Gelder conducted an expedition that resulted in c.a. 200 specimens (Van Gelder 1969), which are currently held by the American Museum of Natural History, New York.In 1976, R. Smithers and J.L. Tello published the Check List and Atlas of the Mammals of Moçambique.The authors compiled information from some of the expeditions here enumerated along with more than 100 literature references.
With the advent of peace in the country in 1992 and the commitment to the United Nations Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD), the government began promoting field surveys, mainly in protected areas (e.g.Dunham 2004;Mesochina, Langa & Chardonnet 2008).Expeditions to the montane areas in North Mozambique, under the Darwin Initiative grant, registered the presence of mammal species and opportunistically collected small mammals (e.g.Bayliss et al. 2010;Timberlake et al. 2007).The Royal Museum for Central Africa, Belgium, supported the African Rodentia project (Terryn et al. 2007), which includes a collection of rodents from Mozambique.The Chicago Field Museum of Natural History (FMNH) also holds a collection of mammals from Mozambique.Also noteworthy is a study of bat species that resulted in a few new species for the country's fauna (Monadjem et al. 2010).Mozambique's universities and research centres have also been participating in biodiversity surveys and studies (e.g.Gomes 2013;Schneider 2004).

Study area
Mozambique, located on the Indian ocean coast of southeast Africa, holds an extensive coastal territory of more than 800 000 square kilometres (Figure 1b).A large part of the country's topography is characterised by flat terrain, extending from coastal plains in the east to mountain ranges in the west.The climate is generally tropical and dry, but temperature and precipitation are highly variable throughout the country (McSweeney, New & Lizcano 2010).Accounting for these regional differences, biodiversity studies (as in Monadjem et al. 2010) tend to classify the country in three major biogeographic regions (Figure 1a): (1) North Mozambique, north of the Zambezi river, characterised by evergreen forests or deciduous woodlands, (2) Central Mozambique, between the Save and Zambezi Rivers, which has vegetation that varies from evergreen forest and moist deciduous forest, scrub and grasslands to a semi-arid woodland and savannah and (3) South Mozambique, south of the Save River, which is mostly flat terrain characterised by deciduous woodlands ranging from moist to semi-arid woodlands and savannah.
Since the commitment to the CBD, ratified in 1994 (Resolution 2/94 of 24 August 1994), the total protected area for biodiversity in Mozambique has increased from 15% to 26% of the territory (Ministry for the Coordination of Environmental Affairs [MICOA] 2014).Some of the alreadyexistent protected areas were extended (e.g.Niassa National Reserve), but new areas such as Mágoè National Park (NP), the only protected area in Tete Province, were also created.In total, 13 NPs and national reserves (NRs) were recognised (Figure 1a), plus several forest and community reserves and official hunting areas.Furthermore, three transfrontier protected areas, the Great Limpopo Park, the Lubombo

Data cleaning and organisation
Data from the GBIF and natural history museums were provided in a computer-readable table format.Data from analogue sources, such as books, scientific articles and reports, were digitised to a table.When provided graphically on maps or grids the data was georeferenced and localities of occurrence were digitised to shapefiles using the geographic information system software Quantum GIS 1.7.4.'Wroclaw' (QGIS Development Team 2012).All data were organised and stored following the Darwin Core's protocols for standardisation of biological diversity documentation regarding taxonomic, geographic and temporal information (Wieczorek et al. 2012).
Firstly, retrieved records that fulfilled the following requisites were discarded: (1) did not contain taxonomic identification at species level, (2) represented introduced or commensal species, (3) had incomplete or no information regarding location of collection event, (4) were not collected in Mozambique or (5) were duplicates.
Secondly, to improve data quality, taxonomic and geographic information associated with each record was cleaned and standardised manually (Chapman 2005).Nomenclatural and taxonomic classification of species was standardised following Wilson and Reeder (2005), and variants in the scientific name of a species, either synonyms or orthographic errors, were referred to a valid scientific name.The names were then compared against the Integrated Taxonomic Information System database (ITIS 2017) to ensure that the most current name was being used.
Thirdly, the locality of occurrence and other geographic information were updated or complemented by using the database on the GeoNames portal (2012) and georeferenced in the statistical software R (R Core Team 2016) using the distribution modelling package's geocode function, which sends requests to the Google API for geographical coordinates and corresponding uncertainty (Hijmans et al. 2016).Afterward, the coordinates of all localities of occurrence were manually curated.These were considered identical when latitude and longitude information (with two-digit precision) coincided.Records collected after the year 2000 were classified as recent.

Species selection process
The list of species obtained in our study is a result of the species-occurrence data gathered from the GBIF, NHC, survey reports and literature; none of the specimens upon which occurrences are based was directly examined.To partly overcome this impediment, we developed a species selection process for specimen data from GBIF records and museums.This refinement process was an attempt to distinguish between species definitely found and species with questionable occurrence in the country.
The aim of the species selection process was, as in other studies (e.g.Amori et al. 2016), to categorise the species detected in more than one data source as species with wellsupported occurrence.Here, in addition to the number of collectors, we also accounted for the number of records collected and presence in Smithers and Tello (1976) (Figure 2 shows the decision framework).At the end of the selection process, two species lists were produced: a species checklist and a questionable occurrence list.A species-occurrence record was considered well supported and was entered into the species checklist when (1) the species was independently recorded by different collectors or (2) the species was recorded by a single collector, but was listed in Smithers and Tello (1976).The additional list that resulted from the selection process contains species with questionable occurrence in the country.The criteria upon which a species was included in this list were (1) the species was not listed in Smithers and Tello (1976) and its presence was only supported by a single record, (2) the species was not listed in Smithers and Tello (1976) and multiple records exist, but were all cited by a single author or (3) the species was listed with a single record in Smithers and Tello (1976).
For each taxon, we compiled the information on species

Taxonomic completeness
To assess the degree of taxonomic completeness of the species checklist we used species accumulation curves (SAC; Moreno & Halffter 2000).We computed SAC for the complete set of mammal records from the species checklist and for each mammal order with more than two species listed.
Species-occurrence records were aggregated to a ¼º spatial resolution grid, and the total number of grid cells across the country was 1217.Using the grid cells as a surrogate measure of sampling effort, we calculated the cumulative number of species with the increase in the number of records for each of the country's cells (Lobo 2008).Species accumulation curves are expected to reach an asymptote when the probability of adding a new species to the list approaches zero.To smoothe the curve of species richness the number of species accumulated was obtained by adding cells in a random order with 100 permutations (Lobo 2008).Species accumulation curves were computed with the function specaccum in the R package: vegan (Oksanen 2013).
To calculate the overall taxonomic completeness, we extrapolated the total species richness for the country, applying the non-parametric species richness estimator, firstorder jackknife (Colwell, Xuan Mao & Chang 2004).The results were then compared to the total number of species in the species checklist.This non-parametric first-order jackknife was selected because it is less affected than other estimators by incidence-based data (Hortal, Borges & Gaspar 2006).The extrapolated species richness was calculated with the specpool function (R package: vegan).

Data summary
The  (Smithers & Tello 1976).At that time, North Mozambique was an inaccessible region.During the 19th and 20th centuries species collection took place mostly in the southern areas and those around the Zambezi River.In recent years, however, growing political stability along with an increase in accessibility to North Mozambique has enabled more surveys and expedition events.Moreover, these new surveys to North Mozambique have revealed many new species and records for the country, for various taxonomic groups (e.g.Conradie et al. 2016;Monadjem et al. 2010;Portik et al. 2013;Van Noort et al. 2007).Is the species included in Smithers and Tello (1976)?

QuesƟonable occurrence species list Species checklist
More than 1 SPECIMEN record?
FIGURE 2: Species selection process framework -decision tree followed to establish whether the report of a species occurrence in the country was well supported.
Regarding the temporal coverage of the data, the earliest records compiled are from 1842 to 1848 and were collected during Wilhelm Peters's expedition.The latest records refer to a recent publication by Taylor et al. (2018; Figure 3).Records retrieved through GBIF were collected between 1892 and 2015.
The period of the records from the other NHC is 1845-1991.The scientific literature included, besides Smithers and Tello's species checklist (1976), ranges from 1985 to 2018.Moreover, the national survey reports and reports from expeditions to montane areas in North Mozambique were all published after the year 2000, between 2004 and 2010.When we group the records in decades, the collecting effort is not regularly distributed over the years (Figure 3).Starting in 1840, there are peaks of collecting effort located in the 1960s, 1970s and 2000s; during these peaks species from all mammal orders were reported.On the other hand, for the periods 1860-1890 and 1990-2000 very few records of mammal occurrence were available, and very few species were reported.

The species lists
Following our compilation and species selection criteria, a total of 217 reported mammal species, representing 14 orders, 39 families and 133 genera, were found to have supported occurrence in Mozambique (Table 1; Appendix 2).The diversity of species is considerable as all families accounted for in the southern African subregion (Skinner & Chimimba 2005) are found in Mozambique, as well as above 87% of genera and approximately 71% of species (Table 1).Thirteen of the reported species are threatened by extinction (IUCN 2017; Table 2).
The species checklist comprises 14 981 records, representing 8141 localities of occurrence.Nearly a third of the species have fewer than 10 records; and approximately a quarter of the species did not have recent records (Table 2).
We additionally identified 73 taxonomic changes defined as changes in the scientific names and 43 distributional changes from Smithers and Tello (1976).We considered a distributional change when we gathered for a species a location of occurrence in a biogeographical region not reported in Smithers and Tello (1976).Most of the distributional changes (25 species) reflect new species records reported from North Mozambique.In addition, since the publication of Smithers and Tello (1976), 11 species had their occurrence extended to Central Mozambique, and 7 species had their occurrence extended to South Mozambique.

Taxonomic completeness
The total species richness extrapolated for Mozambique resulted in approximately 232 species.Hence, our species checklist, given the total of 217 species, is approximately 93.5% taxonomically complete (Table 2).
According to the extrapolated richness of each mammal order considered, the species checklist is incomplete for Chiroptera, with a taxonomic completeness of 84.5%, and close to completion for Eulipotyphla and Rodentia, with 90.0% and 98.1%, respectively (Table 2).For the other mammal orders, the extrapolated richness was equal to the number of species in the species checklist.For Artiodactyla and Carnivora, the SAC support this result by presenting a close asymptote shape, which indicates that these are wellrepresented groups (Appendix 4, Figure 1-A4).

Mammal orders accounts
Below we present a systematic account for each mammal order represented in our data set, with detailed and specific comments.

Afrosoricida (golden moles and tenrecs)
This order is represented by two species of golden moles (family Chrysochloridae), Calcochloris obtusirostris (Peters, 1851) and Carpitalpa arendsi (Lundholm, 1955).Data for both species are scarce (Appendix 2).The first records of C. obtusirostris resulted from the W. Peters expedition (Peters 1852) and represent the species type-locality 'Coastal Mozambique, Inhambane, 24°S', South Mozambique.This species is listed in Smithers and Tello (1976) and was last collected in 1989 (Downs & Wirminghaus 1997).The presence of the other golden mole, C. arendsi, a vulnerable species (IUCN 2017), is based on six records: five records compiled by Smithers and Tello (1976) and a single specimen collected in Central Mozambique during the Smithsonian expedition (USNM 365001).
Two Suidae species occur throughout the country: the warthog, Phacochoerus africanus (Gmelin, 1788), and the bush pig, Potamochoerus larvatus (F.Cuvier, 1822).The occurrence of both species has been confirmed since the mid-19th century.From the year 2000 onwards, their presence has been observed in nine protected areas and their surroundings across all biogeographical areas (e.g.Agreco 2008).
Most canids reported have recent records except for the bateared fox, Otocyon megalotis (Desmarest, 1822).This species was only mentioned for South Mozambique (Banhine NP and adjacent areas) by Smithers and Tello (1976), and its current occurrence status in the country should be further investigated.
Nine species of Herpestidae are reported to occur in Mozambique.Four mongoose species have their current occurrence confirmed in the country (e.g.Mesochina et al. 2008;Stalmans & Peel 2009).The remaining five were last recorded before 1976 (Smithers & Tello 1976).Among these, two species' occurrences are based on a few records: Paracynictis selousi (De Winton, 1896), with just two records, and Bdeogale crassicauda (Peters, 1852), firstly collected in Mozambique by W. Peters, with 10 records.
Three Hyaenidae species are listed as occurring in Mozambique (Appendix 2).The hyena Crocuta crocuta (Erxleben, 1777), with a high number of records in the past and across the entire country (Smithers & Tello 1976), is the only species for which recent records exist, though only two records were found (Quirimbas NP; GRNB 2010).Only mentioned in Smithers and Tello (1976), the other two species have fewer than 10 records each: the near-threatened Hyaena brunnea (Thunberg, 1820) and the aardwolf, Proteles cristata (Sparrman, 1783), in Central and South Mozambique.
The occurrence of Rhinolophus capensis (Lichtenstein, 1823) in Mozambique is rejected by Monadjem et al. (2010).The authors consider that specimens labelled as R. capensis (e.g.Smithers & Tello 1976) were based on misidentifications, as the species is endemic to South Africa.However, following the methodology herein proposed and given that this species was listed by Smithers and Tello (1976) and was reported in 2003 (FMNH 177108;FMNH 177109;FMNH 177214), this species is still included in our species checklist.Nevertheless, we advise a reappraisal of the previously listed specimens in other to clarify their taxonomic identification.

Eulipotyphla (shrews, moles and solenodons)
Nine shrew species are known to occur in Mozambique (suborder Soricomorpha; family Soricidae; Table 1).Among those, seven species were recently recorded in the country: Crocidura hirta (Peters, 1852) The forest shrew M. meesteri was recently described as a new species (Taylor et al. 2013).The authors described this species based on three records, two from Gorongosa NP, Mozambique, and one from Mutare, Zimbabwe, and no records of M. cafer (Sundevall 1846) in Mozambique.In the past, the only species of the genus Myosorex (Gray, 1837) included as part of the Mozambique's fauna was M. cafer, with records from the same areas (Smithers & Tello 1976).The recent work by Taylor et al. (2013) proposed that populations formerly classified as M. cafer should be renamed as M. meesteri.Given this, we only included in our species checklist the species M. meesteri.

Hyracoidea (hyraxes)
This order is represented by three species, all from the Procaviidae family, which are all listed in Smithers and Tello (1976; Table 1).Two of these species were recently reported from North Mozambique (

Lagomorpha (rabbits, hares and pikas)
Four lagomorph species were listed for Mozambique (Table 2).(Wilson & Reeder 2005).The species name P. rupestris was previously incorporated in P. crassicaudatus (Wilson & Reeder 2005); thus a taxonomic revision is required to determine its taxonomic validity and identity.

Macroscelidea (elephant shrews)
Five species belonging to three different genera, all from the Macroscelididae family, are reported from Mozambique (Table 1).Three of these species were firstly described by W. Peters based on specimens collected during his expedition to Mozambique (Peters 1852): Elephantulus fuscus (Peters, 1852); Petrodromus tetradactylus (Peters, 1846); and Rhynchocyon cirnei (Peters, 1847).Two of these, the elephant shrew P. tetradactylus and the near-threatened R.

Perissodactyla (odd-toed ungulates)
In Mozambique, this order is represented by three species from the families Equidae (1 species) and Rhinocerotidae (2 species; Appendix 2).All species are listed in Smithers and Tello (1976)

Pholidota (pangolins)
A single pangolin species was reported from Mozambique, the ground pangolin Manis temminckii (Smuts, 1832).A total of 17 records are reported by Smithers and Tello (1976) and its presence was recently found in Gilé NP (Mesochina et al. 2008; Appendix 2).One species, the pangolin M. tricupis (Rafinesque, 1821), was classified as having questionable occurrence in the country as its presence is based on a single specimen housed in the MNHN, Paris (MNHN 1851-519; Appendix 3).Little information is associated with this specimen, and as such the occurrence of this species in Mozambique deserves further investigation.

Primates (e.g. monkeys, apes)
Both families of non-human primates occurring in southern Africa, the Cercopithecidae and the Galagidae, are represented in Mozambique.A total of eight species from six genera occur in the country (Table 1).Most of the species (7 species) have been previously reported by Smithers and Tello (1976) and were recently recorded at many protected areas (e.g.Agreco 2008;Dunham et al. 2010).The small-eared galago, Otolemur garnettii (Ogilby, 1836), is the only species that was neither listed in Smithers and Tello (1976)

Proboscidea (elephants)
The compiled data on the occurrence of the elephant Loxodonta africana (Blumenbach 1797) in Mozambique are mainly based on observation records.Specimen data from expeditions during the 19th and 20th century also exist, but in low numbers (14 specimens from six institutions; Appendix 3).In a national monitoring report, six elephant populations were identified (Agreco 2008).The species has been poached over the years, and even inside protected areas this species is in danger of extinction (Ntumi et al. 2009).

Tubulidentata (aardvarks)
This order is represented in Mozambique by a single species, the aardvark, Orycteropus afer (Pallas, 1766).Most of the records compiled for the species are listed in Smithers and Tello (1976).Recent reports refer to its presence at Quirimbas NP and Gilé NR, North Mozambique (GRNB 2010; Mesochina et al. 2008).

Discussion
The present study integrated mammal occurrence records from several data sources and thus contributed to an update of the checklist of the terrestrial mammals of Mozambique, pinpointing species and specimens in need of occurrence and taxonomic re-evaluation.In addition, the methodological approach presented here can be easily adapted to produce species checklists of crucial importance to countries facing a similar lack of knowledge regarding the elements of their biodiversity.
The diversity of terrestrial mammals found for Mozambique is yet most likely an underestimation of the country's mammal diversity, despite the 14% increment in the number of species in comparison with Smithers and Tello (1976).In fact, when compared with the number of species listed for adjacent countries, such as South Africa (247 species; Groombridge & Jenkins 1994) or Zimbabwe (270 species; Groombridge & Jenkins 1994), again, it is apparent that there are still a considerable number of species unaccounted for.
To uncover the potential mammalian diversity of Mozambique, further surveys are critical, especially surveys aiming at specific groups, namely the less-known ones.Our study shows that Afrosoricidae, Hyracoidea, Lagomorpha, Macroscelidea and Rodentia were less sampled over the years; also, only half of these smaller mammals were recently reported, and most of them with fewer than 10 records across the country.The work of Monadjem et al. (2010), which targeted the order Chiroptera, shows how surveys aiming at specific groups are important to fill gaps in knowledge.This work identified 50 bat species, with seven being new records for the country.
Although most mammalian orders have a fairly stable taxonomy, our data highlights the need for a re-evaluation of the identity of some species reported from Mozambique.For example, as described before, some of the listed species of the problematic Viverridae family do not have their identity and occurrence confirmed because of lack of specimen reappraisal; also, for the hare species P. rupestris we are cautious about its taxonomic validity and identity.Certainly, when a species presence is based on museum specimens their reappraisal is possible.Nowadays, this evaluation can count on techniques spanning from classical morphometric analysis to modern molecular analysis (Ceríaco, Marques & Bauer 2016;Moratelli & Wilson 2014).The reappraisal of these already-collected specimens will state their identity, clarify the species occurrence throughout the country and contribute to an augmented knowledge of the country's conservation value.
In this way, to increase the knowledge of Mozambique's mammal diversity, we plead for attention from mammologists to the need to study these specimens.
Lastly, and considering that most records integrated in our compilation are from European and North American institutions, the work hereby presented would greatly improve with the integration of data from African institutions.Therefore, an effort should be made to make these important collections accessible online, in light of what is surfacing in natural history museums in South Africa and Zimbabwe, currently contributing information to the GBIF data portal (Coetzer, Hamer & Parker-Allie 2012).

Conclusion
The establishment of species checklists is of utmost importance to the definition of conservation policies and promotes the documentation and protection of biodiversity (Amori et al. 2012).We hope that the species checklist compiled here should serve as a taxonomic resource and baseline for researchers, decision-makers, conservationists and students interested in the Mozambican fauna.The data presented is crucial for biodiversity assessments, as required by the CBD, and furthermore highlights the potential mammal diversity still to be uncovered in Mozambique.
Appendix 1: List of the data sources for primary species-occurrence data of terrestrial mammal species reported from Mozambique.Smithers and Tello (1976).Appendix 4 FIGURE 1-A4: Species accumulation curves representing the cumulative number of species with the increase in the number of records for Mozambique's grid cells (1/4 o ), for each mammal order with more than two species of terrestrial mammals reported from Mozambique, were computed using the grid cells as a surrogate measure of sampling effort.To smoothe the curve of species richness the number of species accumulated was obtained by adding cells in a random order with 100 permutations.

FIGURE 1 :
FIGURE 1: (a) Map of Mozambique, with protected areas in dark grey and two rivers shown as dark lines that divide the country into three major biogeographical areas: North Mozambique, Central Mozambique and South Mozambique, (b) Inset with the location of Mozambique in the African continent, (c) Spatial representation of 8149 unique localities of occurrence of the primary species-occurrence data used to produce the species checklist of terrestrial mammal species reported from Mozambique.

TABLE 1 :
Skinner and Chimimba (2005) terrestrial mammals from Mozambique in the present study with the last checklist published for Mozambique(Smithers &  Tello 1976) and mammal diversity in the southern African subregion, according toSkinner and Chimimba (2005), per mammal order.Family Phocidae not included.‡,Commensal species were not included.¶, The orders Cetacea and Sirenia not included.

TABLE 2 :
Summary description of the reported species in the species checklist of terrestrial mammals from Mozambique, extrapolated species richness and taxonomic completeness.
Notes: Shown are the total number of species, the number of threatened species, the number of species reported with fewer than 10 records, the number of species reported from Mozambique after the year 2000 ('recent'), per mammal order.Species richness calculated using jackknife estimator; standard deviation in brackets.Taxonomic completeness calculated as (total number of species/species richness) × 100.Species are considered 'threatened' when they are classified as 'vulnerable', 'endangered' or 'critically endangered' by the IUCN (2017) Red List.Comp., taxonomic completeness.

TABLE 1 -
A1: Natural history collections.Data downloaded from Global Biodiversity Information Facility -www.gbif.org

TABLE 1 -
A2 (Continues...): Checklist of the terrestrial mammals reported from Mozambique.The table presents, for each species, information on the conservation status according to the IUCN (2017); the number of records compiled; the documented distribution given the biogeographical areas: N, North Mozambique; C, Central Mozambique; S, South Mozambique; and the last known reference of occurrence.As assessed by the IUCN, the following labels are used to indicate each species' conservation status: CR, critically endangered; EN, endangered; VU, vulnerable; NT, near threatened; LC, least concern; and DD, data deficient.Source references are detailed in Appendix 1. IUCN, International Union for the Conservation of Nature.†, Species not included in Notes: