by Charles H. Smith, Ph.D.

     Some years ago I started drafting up a series of family-level distribution maps for a number of mammal, reptile, and amphibian groups. At the time I did a reasonably thorough review of the existing literature; the related bibliographies I compiled eventually became the MAMMFAUN and HERPFAUN resources that I have put up online. Many of the maps were nearly completed at the time, and as time permits and I have a chance to review some newer sources and finish them I intend to start making these available.

     Many of these distribution maps are more precisely rendered than is usually the case for family-level maps, and while it is true that attempts at greater precision sometimes bring their own new sources of error, I hope that these efforts will in general provide students of distribution with an additional resource. I of course welcome any leads on corrections that may be warranted.

     The maps as produced represent an attempt at a compromise between "original distribution" estimates and an exact documentation of current presence. More specifically, I aspire to a view that might be termed "potential current distribution"--that is, what the distribution would look like if, given the constraints of human domination of habitat, mammalian forms were allowed to persist within areas they have been known to inhabit within the past fifty years or so. The "actual" limits of distribution of the families represented are therefore in reality somewhat more restricted (especially, discontinuous) than I show, but given the fact that I have attempted to integrate information found in both dot maps and shaded map estimates (themselves sometimes describing "original" range, and sometimes incorporating estimates of full range based on access, conservation, and habitat conditions), this hardly could be avoided.

     The authority for the systematics employed, with but few exceptions, is Mammal Species of the World, third edition (2005), edited by Don E. Wilson and DeeAnn M. Reeder. In a few cases I have broken down particular families into their subfamilial divisions, or mapped older classification units if the data were handy.

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