With over 12,000 described species and many more awaiting description and discovery, ants are one of the most ecologically and numerically abundant of the planet’s megadiverse groups.
On October 22-24, the Biodiversity Synthesis Center hosted an EOL workshop in conjunction with EOL partner Animal Diversity Web. The workshop goals were to broaden the reach and increase the effectiveness of university students authoring species accounts. A diverse group of 22 participants from four countries assembled to present different programs that involve student authorship and gathering of species data.
EOL’s Biodiversity Synthesis Group hosted the second of three meetings in 18 months designed to develop objective criteria for assessing species’ relative endangerment due to climate change. This meeting focused on establishing a statistical model that can evaluate species’ relative responses to climate change based on the integration of diverse kinds of comparative empirical species data. This quantitative tool aims to be operational across taxa so that it can be used to determine a set of fixed criteria for the evaluation of species endangerment due to climate change, similar to the criteria used for IUCN species assessments. Ultimately, these criteria will be applied to specific case studies with the hope of informing existing EOL content.
