Chionomys nivalis (Martins, 1842) . Rev. Zool. Paris, p. 331.

TYPE LOCALITY: Switzerland, Berner Oberland, Faulhorn .

DISTRIBUTION: Mountains of Europe from Spain through the Alps to Tatra, the Carpathians, Balkans, Mt Olympus and Pindus Range, east to W Caucasus, Turkey, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Transcaucasia, Kopet Dag, and Zagros Mtns of Iran (see Krapp, 1982«, for European range and Harrison and Bates, 1991, for Middle East). Records in Greece were provided by Niethammer (1987b).

SYNONYMS: abulensis, aleco, alpinus, aquitanius, cedrorum, dementievi, herntonis, lebrunii, leucurus (of Gerbe, 1852, not Blyth, 1863), loginovi, ntalyi, mirhanreini, nivicola, olympius, petrophilus, pontius, radnensis, satunini, spitzenbergerae, trialeticus, ulpius, wagneri.

COMMENTS: European populations reviewed by Krapp (1982a). Intraspecific morphological variation among Carpathian samples were analyzed by Kratochvil (1981) along with a review of European and Turkish subspecies. The subspecies spitzenbergerae denotes a population from S Turkey that was previously identified as C. gud (Nadachowski, 1990b), a species which is known only from NE Turkey where it is sympatric with C. nivalis . Analyses of vertical distribution of C. nivalis in Yugoslavia (Krystufek and Kovacic, 1989) and geographic variation among samples from Austria and Yugoslavia (Krystufek, 1990) amplify knowledge of morphological variation within the species. Chromosomal variation in Bulgarian populations was reported by Peshev and Belcheva (1979). Allozyme variation and differentiation among samples of C. nivalis from N Italy and Israel were reported by Filippucci et al. (1991), who also noted that the Israeli population from Mt. Hermon (herntonis) might represent a separate species.