Community Responses to Climate Change in the Simien Mountains

In 1927 a team led by Alfred M. Bailey sampled wildlife along the western slope of the Simien Mountains (map attached). While the results of the “Chicago Daily News Abyssinian Expedition” were published by Wilfred H. Osgood, including species accounts and descriptions of the new mammal species encountered (Osgood, 1936), information such as elevational distributions and species abundance were not. Now 90 years later, these specimens, field journals, and original documents preserved at the Field Museum of Natural History can be used to investigate responses to climate change among the small mammal communities in the Simien Mountains.