New paper on the GABI database

Image by Georg Fisher & Aina Urano

A new paper describing the GABI (Global Ant Biodiversity Informatics) database has recently been published in Myrmecological News. The GABI database is the first comprehensive global database of ant species distributions and is created from the compilation of 1.72 million records extracted from over 8811 publications and 25 existing databases. It is a major step towards the inclusion of invertebrate taxa in large-scale analyses of biodiversity patterns, and it opens up new possibilities for macroecology, macroevolution, and conservation research on ants.

See here for the original publication.

New publication by the antmaps team!

antmaps

The design and implementation of antmaps.org was described in a paper (Visualizing and interacting with large-volume biodiversity data using client–server web-mapping applications: The design and implementation of antmaps.org) that was published this week in Ecological Informatics. It describes the trend of the increasingly frequent use of web and database technologies within the biological fields, it uses antmaps.org as a case study to propose a web-mapping framework for visualizing large-volume biodiversity data, it describes the key design ideas (cartographic design and user-centered design) behind the application and it details the evaluation of the application to assure the usability of the interface.

Click on this link to read the full paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2016.02.006