Interested in the distribution of animal species on a global or continental level? This can be easily illustrated with R using the data provided by the IUCN Red List. In this post, I will focus on mammals in Africa, the continent where I have conducted most of my field work. But the code below can be easily adapted to other areas of the world and other taxonomic groups of species, or only species at low or high risk of extinction (though the completeness of the IUCN data is variable across different groups).