A long-term research goal of our lab is to build a comprehensive database and map of how ants are distributed around the world. We recently published a milestone in this effort, the first high-resolution mapping of richness and rarity. In this study, we compared ant patterns to vertebrates and used machine learning to predict hotspots of undiscovered diversity, which should help guide future research.
I explain more in a twitter thread and in an interview on the Science podcast.
The paper, led by first authors Jamie Kass and long-term collaborator Benoit Guénard can be found here.
