The global distribution of known and undiscovered ant biodiversity
DOI10.5281/zenodo.6877406Zenodo6877406MaRDI QIDQ6681229FDOQ6681229
Dataset published at Zenodo repository.
Brian Fisher, Robert Dunn, Kiko Gomez, Anne Chao, William MacKay, Peter Hawkes, Catherine Parr, Michael Weiser, Nathan J. Sanders, John Lattke, Evan Economo, Simon Robson, Jamie M. Kass, David Lubertazzi, Christos Georgiadis, Clinton Jenkins, Rumsaïs Blatrix, Robert Guralnick, James Des Lauriers, Kenneth Dudley, David Donoso, Walter Jetz, Heloise Gibb, Benoit Guénard, John Longino, Joe MacGown, Fumika Azuma, Philip Ward, Robert Johnson
Publication date: 24 August 2022
Invertebrates constitute the majority of animal species and are critical for ecosystem functioning and services. Nonetheless, global invertebrate biodiversity patterns and their congruences with vertebrates remain largely unknown. We resolve the first high-resolution (~20-km) global diversity map for a major invertebrate clade, ants, using biodiversity informatics, range modeling, and machine learning to synthesize existing knowledge and predict the distribution of undiscovered diversity. We find that ants and different vertebrate groups have distinct features in their patterns of richness and rarity, underscoring the need to consider a diversity of taxa in conservation. However, despite their phylogenetic and physiological divergence, ant distributions are not highly anomalous relative to variation among vertebrate clades. Furthermore, our models predict rarity centers largely overlap (78%), suggesting that general forces shape endemism patterns across taxa. This raises confidence that conservation of areas important for small-ranged vertebrates will benefit invertebrates while providing a "treasure map" to guide future discovery.
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