Building a Global Ant Inventory

Global Ant Catalogue

The creation of a “live” community-based, on-line Global Ant Catalogue, supported by NSF and the California Academy of Sciences with funds of $500,000 was put forward by conference participants to serve as the initial phase of a ten year project. Building upon the foundation of AntWeb.org, Bolton’s digital Catalogue of the Ants of the World, A Bibliography of Ant Systematics (Ward, et al); and supported by a global network of ant ecologists, taxonomists and others, a consensus for the presentation of valid names for ants will be created. This catalogue will become the nexus of a much larger digital network of images, scientific literature, distribution data, molecular data, and behavior and biology.

The Challenge

A Global Ant Catalogue serving the entire world from the web and supported by a community of myrmecologists forms the foundation of a ten year effort to build a global ant inventory. During the next decade, the challenge is to support taxonomists in their effort to collect, identify and describe new ant species. This future support can be broken down into several distinct categories.

• Imaging: Approximately 10,000 ant species require about 40,000 separate images including frontal, lateral and dorsal views as well as the collection label. High resolution, color images with increased depth of field can now be produced with consistency. This includes images of museum specimens as well as images of ants in the field. Type images of ants from major and minor collections are the core source for a global ant inventory. A collaborative effort to combine images of ant types from all over the world is needed. Also important are images of different worker castes, males, female reproductives, larvae, nest structures and ant species collected in good condition that can be compared with types.

• Scientific Literature: A Bibliography of Ant Systematics is a key source for an inventory of the more than 9,000 taxonomic and related publications on ants. New techniques in scanning and parsing text of scientific literature will make critical taxonomic literature (approx. 4,000 publications) available to the global community. As completely as possible, all literature on ants, with copyright permission, needs to be linked to the Global Ant Catalogue.

• Distribution Data: With hand-held global positioning systems, digital gazetteers, and mapping software companies such as Google Earth and ESRI, it is now possible to bring together distribution data on ants on a global basis. From electronic ant field guides to a particular country or nature preserve, data can be “scaled up” to the level of biogeographic regions. The sharing and contribution of distribution data from the global community is needed.

• Molecular Data: Phylogenetic and evolutionary studies are creating NDA libraries for ants. Efforts such as DNA barcoding of populations and species of ants are generating unique data sets of information. As molecular studies increase in frequency and sophistication, we need to incorporate this DNA information into the Global Ant Catalogue.

• Behavior and Biology: This information, which often arises out of field studies in ecology and behavior, is often lost to publication because it is not a major component of a particular hypothesis or study. We can benefit from sharing information on colony size, multiple queens, nest distribution patterns, foraging behavior, food sources and other demographics for all ant species. We need to create a platform for the sharing and contribution of this data on a global basis.

The Solution

The solution to all of the above challenges is to foster and support a global ant community with shared interests and shared goals. Productive ant taxonomists, ecologists, and behaviorists reside in numerous countries. All participants must be comfortable in making contributions, obtaining attribution and in data-mining the archives and resources of the global ant inventory. Thus open source, creative commons and other copyright permissions consistent with the Encyclopedia of Life will serve as our model. A combination of taxonomic catalogue data, images, literature, distribution patterns, molecular data, and biology and behavior are the ingredients in a standard species page for ants. As the global ant inventory succeeds, the source information for species pages on ants for the Encyclopedia of Life succeeds.

During the recent Global Ant Project meeting at Harvard University, several strategies were discussed and endorsed in support of ant taxonomy. Participants volunteered to contribute to an Ant Species Page Group and a Global Ant Catalogue Group. Writing a proposal and obtaining $10 million in funding for a 10 year period was acknowledged as an initial step to facilitate the success of the overall enterprise. This funding will accelerate accomplishing the challenges listed above and will serve to motivate other taxonomic groups to collaborate globally to achieve similar results.

Resources

Tools being developed as part of the global ant project include: (1) access to an integrated backbone of taxonomic information previously hidden in select museums and libraries; (2) enhanced digital imaging technology for identification and description; and (3) an online infrastructure for the digital collation and publication of taxonomic products such as species descriptions, maps and genetic sequences. These tools simultaneously address two of the most important issues facing the practice of taxonomy: a need to reduce the amount of time and number of steps required to identify and describe taxa, and an equal need to democratize the practice of taxonomy, thereby improving both the access and visibility of, taxonomic products.

AntWeb

AntWeb provides access to up-to-date and scientifically verified biodiversity data on ants. Although AntWeb currently has the capability to store and deliver images and specimen records, it lacks features that would enable curators to add descriptions of taxa and identification keys as well as download search results.

To achieve our goal of covering all ant species, we must 1) expand our remote curator network to include local experts who will help augment and maintain a virtual ant museum; and 2) add an interface to AntWeb that would enable remote curators to augment the portal with species descriptions and identification keys. By providing the means to curate a collection online, we will make global and regional overviews of ants available to local experts. This feature is of particular value to ant experts in developing countries, and would help form and integrate a community of small museums and experts across regions.

Harvard University

A post doctoral level position within the Museum of Comparative Zoology to serve as a source for expert content contributions to the Global Ant Inventory is under consideration. Contributions can include a combination of species descriptions, species pages for the Encyclopedia of Life and capturing data from the more than one million ants specimens present in the Harvard University ant collection.

A Global Ant Project coordinator, working to insure global participation, management of budgets and expenses, coordination of effort with other ventures and facilitating all aspects of this project is under consideration. The cooridinator will raise funds and maintain documentation on the progress of each category of support for the overall enterprise.

Success

In addition to measuring the number of images and the number of remote curators participating in the Global Ant Project, success will be measured by whether students anywhere can practice taxonomy or identify ants without having to visit European or American museums and libraries.

Other metrics of success will include how well the project (1) permits more people to participate in the taxonomic process; (2) reduces the number of steps in the documentation, collation, publication, and dissemination of taxonomic products; and (3) permits a broader audience to use taxonomic products, thereby increasing the value of systematic research. Long-term success will be achieved when the infrastructure exists to permit ant taxonomic information to be quickly and easily included in conservation and land management decisions.

Budget:

$10,000,000 over 10 years.

There are several major cost elements:

1) Imaging of species: 10,000 species, 40,000 specimen images @ $20/specimen + $120,000 in equipment + travel $60,000. = $980,000.

2) Development of semantically enhanced and openly accessible digital taxonomic literature: number of publications of taxonomic relevance: 4,400, Pages: 200,000; estimated treatments: 89,000. Cost per page, including capturing metadata, Optical Character Reading, markup and hosting. Total cost $1,000,000.

3) Infrastructure and program development of AntWeb to facilitate a community network of contributors (images, species pages, names, literature): $220,000.

4) Encyclopedia of Life Species pages composed by postdocs at MCZ. The most common 5,000 ant species. $60,000/year for 10 years. $600,000.

5) GAP coordination and organization at MCZ: Salary for Coordinator (part time), annual meeting of oversight committee, website maintenance: $100,000/ year for ten years $1,000,000.

6) Support for contribution of information from the global community including ant distribution data, molecular data, and information on biology and behavior. Data entry costs include labor and verification of content. $100,000.

7) Grant support for taxonomists publishing species descriptions including global revisions of ant genera. Costs covered include travel to museums, and publication costs. Merit based appropriations dependent upon results. $6,000,000