Mus rutilus Pallas, 1778 p.246; Type locality- Center of Ob River delta, Siberia, Russia.
Arvicola (Hypudaeus) amurensis Schrenck, 1858 p.129; Type locality- Mouth of Amur River, Siberia.
Clethrionomys rutilus hintoni Vinogradov in Zolotarev, 1936 p.81; Type locality- Iman River, Ussuri, southeastern Siberia; Jones & Johnson, 1965 p.375.
C. amurensis amurensis: Kuroda, 1938 p.5.
C. rutilus: Won, 1968 p.207; Corbet, 1978 p.98; Han, 1994 p.47; Won & Smith, 1999 p.25; Han, 2004c p.134.
C. rutilus amurensis: Won, 1968 p.208; Yoon, 1992 p.74.
Myodes rutilus: Musser & Carleton, 2005 p.1027.
Range: Myodes rutilus occurs in the extreme northeastern region of the Korean Peninsula (Fig. 121). The southern limit of the range is in Chail Peak, Ryanggang-Province (Kim et al. 2015).
Remarks: The northern red-backed vole in Korea has been regarded as M. r. hintoni or M. r. amurensis. Although hintoni is now considered a synonym of amurensis (Won 1968), a re-examination of the subspecific status for Korean populations of Myodes rutilus seems necessary due to considerable local variation such as shorter tail with long hairs on a floccus (Won 1968). In northeastern Asia, four lineages of M. rutilus (central Siberia, fareastern Siberia, Alaska-Kamchatka/Sakhalin and Hokkaido) were identified by using cytochrome b (Iwasa et al. 2002). Kohli et al. (2015) analyzed the same gene and confirmed similar lineages (western = central Siberia; central = far eastern Siberia; and eastern clade with 3 subgroups, Bering, Sakhalin, and Hokkaido), but nuclear gene analysis showed poor structuring among lineages.