A resurvey of the terrestrial mammals of the Davis Mountains Preserve, Texas

The Davis Mountains Preserve is located in Jeff Davis County, Texas. This preserve has been a hotspot of mammalian surveys for the past century due to its vastly different habitat than that of the arid lowlands that surrounds this area. Mt. Livermore is the highest point on the preserve at 2,555 m in elevation. This study was compared to past museum specimen records and surveys by W. F Blair, R. Debaca, and C. Jones over the past 80 years to document any changes in populations across different elevational sites. This resurvey targeted five sites with similar habitat types that had been previously sampled and provided historical records of species for comparison. In total, forty-three terrestrial species have been documented within the Davis Mountains Preserve. My study in 2021-2022 documented 22 of these mammalian species. While many of these species were not detected during this resurvey, this was it likely because lower elevation and more arid sites on Davis Mountains Preserve were not surveyed. For those species documented, I did not detect any elevational shifts in mammalian distribution in the Davis Mountains Preserve over the past 80 years.