Mountains provide important habitats for many species and often have high levels of biodiversity and endemism. Habitat associations of terrestrial small mammals were investigated at Wakefield Farm at the foothills of the Drakensberg Mountains, South Africa from July 2015 to January 2016. Sherman live traps were used to capture small mammals on 35 grids in six different habitats. A total of 472 individuals, from 14 species, were recorded, comprising: 10 rodents, three shrews and one golden mole. Species diversity differed across habitats and seasons. The riparian habitat had the highest species richness, diversity and abundance of small mammals. Species composition also differed across habitats with the indigenous forest and rocky outcrops supporting the most distinct assemblages.

National species checklists are important for a variety of reasons, including biodiversity conservation. However, these national checklists are rarely complete, and it is not easy to gauge how many species have been overlooked or what the taxonomic identities of overlooked species would be. This is particularly the case for small, elusive, or nocturnal species such as bats. Despite their diversity and importance as ecosystem service providers, bat distributions are poorly known throughout much of Africa. We present a national checklist of bats for a small African country, Eswatini, by compiling species from museum specimens and literature records. A total of 32 species of bats have been recorded from the country. Since 1995, new species have continued to be 1 recorded in the country, with five additional species added since the last published checklist in 2016, suggesting that some species may have still been overlooked. In order to determine what species these may be, we used species distribution models based on the occurrence records of bats from southern Africa to predict what species would occur in Eswatini, which was then compared with what has been collected and deposited in museums. Our models predicted that a total of 47 species are likely to occur in Eswatini compared with 32 species collected to date. Our data suggest that the national checklist of bats of Eswatini is not yet complete and that further species are expected to be recorded for the country. We suggest that species distribution models can be useful in gauging the completeness of national checklists and in predicting which species may have been overlooked.