The Miocene Mammal Mapping Project (Miomap) began in 2000 with the goals of (a) constructing a relational database of Miocene and late Oligocene mammal occurrences and associated relevant information; (b) using the data to test questions about the relationship between environmental change and faunal response; (c) distributing the data through web interfaces; and (d) educating students. The project is being continued in order to finish building and serving the database, test ideas about how environmental change affects evolution and geographic distribution of mammals, and continue training postdoctoral, graduate, and undergraduate students. The research questions are relevant to forecasting the effects of current human activities on ecological systems and clarifying the scales at which environmental changes become important to evolutionary and extinction patterns. New scientific infrastructure is provided in the form of a web-accessible database.
