The New Handbook of the Mammals of Europe: Background and Introduction

Abstract

These are good times for mammalogy. New mammal species are constantly being described, and a renewed interest in taxonomy and biodiversity in general has resulted in a number of authoritative new book series on mammals, most notably the Handbook of the Mammals of the World (since 2009, e.g., Wilson and Mittermeier 2009) but also a new (first?) volume of the famous Walker’s Mammals of the World (Nowak 2018). There are also continent-specific multivolume publications like the Mammals of Africa (Kingdon et al. 2013) and the Mammals of South America (so far two volumes: Gardner 2007; Patton et al. 2015), and it therefore seems timely to also tackle the task of an updated Handbook of the Mammals of Europe. The most comprehensive such series to date is the multivolume Handbuch der Säugetiere Europas. Its first volume was published in 1978 (Niethammer and Krapp 1978; Fig. 1) and the last, an overall index and bibliography, in 2005. None of the earlier volumes has ever been updated, and the fact that the whole series is in German makes it largely inaccessible to the vast majority within the European mammalogical community and beyond. This is exactly where the present book series comes in. We aim to present an updated account in English of every living mammal species in Europe. As some original research is still published in non-English journals, we provide an extensive and (near-)complete compilation of current knowledge about each mammal species in Europe.