A wealth of information on the world’s ants
madison sankovitz
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Entomology, University of California Riverside, USA
Figure 1. Formica sibylla ants. Photo credit: Madison Sankovitz.
Ants are one of the most prominent soil macroarthropods. They live almost anywhere on land (except Antarctica and some isolated islands), and most of them nest underground, modifying soil ecosystems in the process. It has been estimated that ants make up 15-20% of the terrestrial animal biomass on Earth. Through subterranean nest excavation and maintenance, they are heavily involved in providing essential soil ecosystem services for humans (such as improving soil structure and increasing organic matter content on marginal land, Figure 1).
For a scientist new to the field, a non-specialist collaborator, or even a seasoned myrmecologist, the task of finding up-to-date information on ant diversity can be daunting. For centuries, myrmecologists have collected ants from around the world. Based on these collections, hundreds of taxonomists have distinguished among the samples, subfamilies, genera, and species. Although the enormous amount of information on this insect family may seem unapproachable, many groups of scientists have worked hard to organize it all into useful databases and maps. We have only begun to uncover the importance of ant diversity to global soil health. These resources allow the assessment of current knowledge and analysis of ant diversity across all spatial scales. They can be used to study ecological and evolutionary patterns and processes, including distribution of species, the roles of environmental gradients and geological histories in shaping biodiversity, and the relative coherence of patterns found in ants with other taxonomic groups, providing a baseline for conservation.
Here, I outline major ant diversity databases and maps. As a Ph.D. student studying ants, it took me a long time to discover all of these resources for myself. So I hope this will be useful and save time for others who are less familiar with the field but looking to study ant diversity or use the information for policy making!
The Wikipedia for ants, with 27,735 articles and 117,608 files uploaded by ant experts worldwide. Contributions come from ant experts together with discussions provided by experts and amateurs. Data is collated from numerous global databases and integrated with individual taxon pages.
Figure 2. Example of high-quality ant specimen images on AntWeb.
The world's largest online database of high-quality images, specimen records, and natural history information on ants (Figure 2). It is community-driven and open to contribution from anyone with specimen records, natural history comments, or images.
antmaps.org (Global Ant Biodiversity Initiative (GABI))
antmaps.org provides a framework for visualizing the known distribution of ant species or higher taxa and accessing the underlying records for those data (Figure 3). It is not a database per se, but rather a tool for visualizing and interacting with the Global Ant Biodiversity Initiative (GABI) database. While other invaluable web tools for myrmecology (such as AntWeb and AntWiki) are more comprehensive and multifaceted resources on ant biodiversity, antmaps.org is built explicitly for mapping species distributions, aggregating diversity patterns, and visualizing data from GABI.
The GABI project aims to compile over 200 years of ant research into a single database providing distribution information for all ant species. In addition to aggregating records from existing specimen databases such as Antweb, the main effort of the long-term collaborative project’s participants consists of mining thousands of papers for literature records, including translating literature in regional non-English journals. The database now has over 1.9 million records, including around 15,000 described ant species and subspecies.
Figure 3. antmaps.org interface.
A comprehensive geo-referenced database on local-scale species assemblages and species traits. At the launch of this website in October 2015, the Global Ants database included more than 82,910 trait values, 2,212 species, and 1,818 georeferenced local assemblages of ants.
Maps showing the places in which each ant genus is known and also where each genus is likely to be found.