ObsMiCE, West African Observatory of Small Mammal Indicators of Environmental Changes

Formalized in 2015, ObsMiCE is based on long-standing collaborations between IRD agents from LPED and CBGP research teams, and partners from several West African countries. It aims to i) perpetuate temporal monitoring of small mammals in various ecosystems (cities and villages, forests, agroecosystems & pastoral areas) initiated in the years 1970 to 2000; ii) gather, archive, analyze, and make available to the scientific community, managers and populations, the information collected; iii) develop a shared methodology for future monitoring and thus facilitate comparative studies, meta-analyses and research programs in partnership. The observatory thus provides data to answer a set of scientific questions, in connection with three priority themes, namely (1) bioinvasions, (2) the links between health (via the study of zoonoses) and environmental changes and (3) documentation of the effects of global changes on biodiversity. Others, related for example to the management of small mammal populations in agricultural and urban ecosystems, have emerged more recently. A major tool of ObsMiCE is the small mammal database hosted by the CBGP, whose summary data can be publicly accessed via http://BPM-CBGP.science.