Mastomys erythroleucus Capture-Mark-Recapture data in Bandia (Senegal) between 1984 and 2012

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Long-term ecological data are of paramount importance to document the effects of global changes on biodiversity. The site of Bandia, 70km southeast of Dakar in western Senegal, has been the scene of numerous ecological studies since the 1970s. The « Bandia forest » was classified as such in 1933, and submitted to a management plan in 1953 (i.e. subdivided in plots for firewood and timber exploitation / plots for reforestation, together with a ban on livestock wandering). However, this regulation was hardly respected, and logging, fuelwood collection, poaching and wandering of livestock regularly occurred, leading to a progressive degradation of the environment until 1990 when the site was erected as the first private natural reserve of Senegal. From there, a 1500ha fenced area further extended to 3500ha has permitted the regrowth of trees / shrubs, the reintroduction of large mammals and overall, the regeneration of a typical Sahelo-Sudanian tree savannah.

In the frame of projects led by researchers of the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD, formerly ORSTOM), rodent populations were monitored at various periods using a capture-mark-recapture (CMR) protocol on trapping grids that yielded important datasets on population dynamics and ecology of the main species present. Among them, the Guinea Multimammate Rat Mastomys erythroleucus proved to represent the dominant species of this community. Thus, CMR data were collected on M. erythroleucus between November 1975 and March 1981 by Bernard Hubert and his collaborators (Hubert, 1982), between January 1983 and October 1986 by Khalilou Bâ, Jean-Marc Duplantier and Laurent Granjon (Granjon, 1987; Duplantier & Granjon, 1988; Crespin et al., 2012), between January 1997 and April 2001 by Khalilou Bâ (Bâ, 2002) and between June 2007 and June 2012 by Khalilou Bâ, Laurent Granjon, Youssoupha Niang and Yves Papillon (see http://vminfotron-dev.mpl.ird.fr:8080/bandia2_2/index.htm).

The datasets corresponding to three of these periods are gathered here to facilitate their consultation and use. Raw data from the 1975-1981 period were not available. For the other periods, the data include the identity of each individual animal captured with some of its biological attributes (sex, weight at first capture of each session, and reproductive activity), its exact date and point of capture (indicated by a trap-specific code) at each trapping occasion, and additional comments that may be of help to interpret the data.

This dataset provides information on life histories of a significant number of individuals from a population of one of the most important rodent species of the Sahelo-Sudanian bioclimatic belt. Population dynamics (including abundance, density, survival, and age composition), breeding cycle and small-scale movements can be estimated from the data here presented. Combined with information on climate (and especially rainfall), vegetation or any other variable of interest, they may serve to test hypotheses linked to interindividual relationships within populations as well as to the determinants of abundance cycles in rodents, including those related to global change consequences.