Credits & sources

Data and software used by this site.

A maintained record of external datasets and public software used in maps, figures, and authored pages.

Research map

Geographic data

  • Kenya national boundary geoBoundaries gbOpen, Kenya ADM0; boundary source RCMRD GeoPortal / geoBoundaries.
  • Kentucky state boundary U.S. Census Bureau TIGERweb States layer, January 1, 2025 vintage.
  • World and Africa country context World Atlas countries-110m, derived from Natural Earth public-domain boundaries; Africa context is bundled from a Natural Earth-derived topology.
  • Kenya national parks, reserves, and game sanctuaries ICPAC GeoPortal, Kenya - Protected Areas, a subset of the WCMC Africa protected-areas database. The source metadata does not specify a license.
  • Kenya inland water bodies Esri World Water Bodies, filtered to the Kenya map area; source copyright lists Esri and Garmin International, Inc.
  • Research locations and routes The Mpala and Loita road paths come from the project’s Google My Maps KMZ export. Mpala uses the mapped destination point; Loita Hills uses a user-recorded camp GPS point. These data are presented for research context, not navigation.
  • Kenya animal sightings Personal field notes from a recent Kenya field trip, cleaned into the Kenya Species Checklist workbook. Provisional and unresolved identifications remain labeled as such; taxonomic source links are retained in the workbook.
  • Open Tree of Life synthetic tree · release 16.1 The sightings figure uses a topology-only induced subtree generated through the Open Tree API with synthesis release 16.1 and Open Tree Taxonomy 3.7.3. All 66 species-level checklist names resolved; eight use accepted Open Tree synonyms or combinations, and none required approximate matching. Unary branches are collapsed for display. Branch spacing is graphical and is not calibrated to divergence time. Family colors are display annotations matched to the checklist names; they do not modify or imply support for the Open Tree topology. Mammal assignments follow the Mammal Diversity Database, bird assignments follow Avibase, and reptile assignments follow the Reptile Database. OpenTree et al., Open Tree of Life Synthetic Tree, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.3937741; OpenTree et al., Open Tree of Life Taxonomy, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.3937750; synthesis method: Redelings & Holder (2017), PeerJ 5:e3058, DOI 10.7717/peerj.3058.
  • Comparative regeneration outcomes and taxonomic framing Riddell et al. (2025), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122(1):e2420726122. Figure 1 provides the experimental outcomes for the eleven sampled rodents and the family/subfamily framing used in the site visualization. Uranomys and Deomys appear as untested deomyine relatives and are therefore labeled unknown, not inferred to be regenerative or scar-forming.
  • Time-calibrated comparative phylogeny The interactive fifteen-taxon tree uses posterior-mean node ages, 95% highest-posterior-density intervals, and topology support from the completed node-dated maximum-clade-credibility mammal tree of Upham, Esselstyn, and Jetz (2019), PLOS Biology 17:e3000494. The source tree set and metadata are archived in Dryad. Eleven tips are the experimentally sampled rodents from Riddell et al.; rabbit, human, Uranomys, and Deomys are contextual taxa. The source taxonomy treats Gerbilliscus vicinus under G. robustus, and Lophuromys zena is placed using the L. flavopunctatus source lineage without inventing a species-level terminal date.
  • Rabbit regeneration and human scarring context Rabbit ear-pinna regeneration is supported by Jang et al. (2013), Cell Journal 15(3):236-241, which describes blastema formation and restoration of rabbit ear tissues after a full-thickness hole. Adult human skin is shown as scar-forming in the broad comparative sense described by Marshall et al. (2018), Advances in Wound Care 7(2):29-45. Both are contextual comparisons rather than taxa assayed in Riddell et al. (2025); specialized human tissues and developmental stages can heal differently.
  • Historical context for comparative regeneration The long experimental history of regeneration is summarized in Understanding regeneration at different scales. The mammalian ear-pinna history follows The blastema and epimorphic regeneration in mammals, which notes a first rabbit ear-hole report in 1953 and decades of subsequent work. Seifert et al. (2012), Nature 489:561-565, established African spiny mice as a modern mammalian system for studying skin and ear-tissue regeneration. Riddell et al. (2025) is presented here as an extension of these research traditions.

Website

Software and typography

  • D3.js Geographic projection, path generation, and SVG rendering; version 7, ISC license.
  • TopoJSON Client Conversion of bundled topology into GeoJSON features; version 3, ISC license.
  • KaTeX Equation rendering for authored science and journal posts.
  • iNaturalist External taxon searches and, when added, links to the author’s observation records.