The Korean Peninsula and its associated Pacific islands have a distinctive, yet poorly studied mammalian fauna. Korea was a land of invasions and wars for many centuries. The loss of large mammals per unit area that has occurred in Korea may have been greater than in any other country. The peninsula has a depauperate rodent community. The forests are mostly harvested, replaced by intensive agriculture. Unfortunately, the dissemination of information about the mammals of Korea and their taxonomy has been limited because most publications were written in Japanese or Korean. We provide an updated checklist of all the species of Korean mammals, including a review of their taxonomy, distribution, and conservation status based on information extracted from international museum collections, local survey databases (Wildlife Survey and National Nature-Environmental Survey, South Korea) and a literature review. We identify 84 species of terrestrial mammals and 43 species of marine mammals that occur, or once occurred, in Korea. Due to previous, erroneous identifications, we delisted three soricids, two vespertilionids, one phocid, one sciurid and one murid. In total, we confirm the presence in Korea of 127 species of mammals distributed in eight Orders and 32 Families. We provide dichotomous keys for the identification of all the Korean species of mammals together with updated distribution maps.

Records of Ixodes pomeranzevi Serdyukova, 1941 (Acari: Ixodidae) from small mammals in northern Gyeonggi and Gangwon Provinces, Republic of Korea

Eastern populations of the Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) have declined throughout Asia. Although the South Korean government designated the Eurasian otter as an Endangered Species and Natural Monument, limited information exists on the distribution and habitat of this top predator in riparian ecosystems at this terminus of its distribution. We documented the distribution and modeled the habitat of this species using sign survey data collected in 2009 and 2010. We analyzed otter presence with 21 raster data sets using environmental niche modeling. We evaluated 31 variables as explanatory variables for logistic regression models that considered detection and non-detection data. We detected otter sign at 83% (3,288 of 3,957) of survey sites within 63% (680 of 1,074) of survey cells. In our MaxEnt presence-only model, land cover type was the main contributing factor to predicting habitat suitability, with secondary influences from isothermality, precipitation in the wettest month, elevation, and temperature seasonality. Water quality and human disturbance were the main variables significantly associated with otter occurrence based on the regression model that included detection and non-detection data. Direct measures of human activity, such as traffic volume and land price, were better predictors than stationary factors such as density of buildings. Our results suggest that otters and humans can coexist in highly populated areas. Our information on the distribution and habitat characteristics of Eurasian otters in South Korea will assist habitat management and recovery projects in natural and anthropogenic environments.