Resolving a high-resolution global map of ant biodiversity for basic biology and applied conservation

2018 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 17K15180
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Biodiversity/Systematics
• Research Institution: Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University
• Principal Investigator: Economo Evan 沖縄科学技術大学院大学, 生物多様性・複雑性研究ユニット, 准教授 (30648978)
• Project Period (FY): 2017-04-01 – 2019-03-31
• Keywords: Biodiversity / Ants / Biogeography / Conservation / Ecoinformatics / Big data

Outline of Final Research Achievements

The main project goal has been to improve our Global Ants Biodiversity Informatics (GABI) database to go beyond country level checklists and make a high-resolution global diversity map for ants and compare to other taxonomic groups to ask questions about global biodiversity. The first main success of our research has been to build a georeferencing and range mapping pipeline, and to date we have georeferenced over 600,000 species occurrence records increasing the size of the dataset to over 2 million georeferenced records. The second goal is to compare biodiversity patterns and biodiversity hotspots with other taxa and analyze large scale patterns, and a number of publications have already appeared with more in progress.

Free Research Field

Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

This work has led to 12 academic publications and many more are still in progress. The data is also visible on antmaps.org and antwiki.org which gets over 25,000 visits per month, many from the general public.