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Abstract Natural history collections are repositories of biodiversity specimens that provide critical infrastructure for studies of mammals. Over the past 3 decades, digitization of collections has opened up the temporal and spatial properties of specimens, stimulating new data sharing, use, and training across the biodiversity sciences. These digital records are the cornerstones of an “extended specimen network,” in which the diverse data derived from specimens become digital, linked, and openly accessible for science and policy. However, still missing from most digital occurrences of mammals are their morphological, reproductive, and life-history traits. Unlocking this information will advance mammalogy, establish richer faunal baselines in an era of rapid environmental change, and contextualize other types of specimen-derived information toward new knowledge and discovery. Here, we present the Ranges Digitization Network (Ranges), a community effort to digitize specimen-level traits from all terrestrial mammals of western North America, append them to digital records, publish them openly in community repositories, and make them interoperable with complimentary data streams. Ranges is a consortium of 23 institutions with an initial focus on non-marine mammal species (both native and introduced) occurring in western Canada, the western United States, and Mexico. The project will establish trait data standards and informatics workflows that can be extended to other regions, taxa, and traits. Reconnecting mammalogists, museum professionals, and researchers for a new era of collections digitization will catalyze advances in mammalogy and create a community-curated trait resource for training and engagement with global conservation initiatives. 

Preventing extinctions requires understanding macroecological patterns of vulnerability or persistence. However, correlates of risk can be nonlinear, within-species risk varies geographically, and current-day threats cannot reveal drivers of past losses. We investigated factors that regulated survival or extinction in Caribbean mammals, which have experienced the globally highest level of human-caused postglacial mammalian extinctions, and included all extinct and extant Holocene island populations of non-volant species (219 survivals or extinctions across 118 islands). Extinction selectivity shows a statistically detectable and complex body mass effect, with survival probability decreasing for both mass extremes, indicating that intermediate-sized species have been more resilient. A strong interaction between mass and age of first human arrival provides quantitative evidence of larger mammals going extinct on the earliest islands colonized, revealing an extinction filter caused by past human activities. Survival probability increases on islands with lower mean elevation (mostly small cays acting as offshore refugia) and decreases with more frequent hurricanes, highlighting the risk of extreme weather events and rising sea levels to surviving species on low-lying cays. These findings demonstrate the interplay between intrinsic biology, regional ecology and specific local threats, providing insights for understanding drivers of biodiversity loss across island systems and fragmented habitats worldwide.