New Website: www.formicidae.org

Hi again

The new www.formicidae.org is up and running. The site is in final beta testing, and any suggestions will be welcome.

Please, find more info on the areas here

Welcome on the forum Kiko.

Thank you for sharing the link. This is a great new resource.

I will used the website more extensively and probably have questions concerning the options on the website.

First of all, congratulations for the website and the information in it. I am working on a similar project right now and I understand the work it represents.

However, I have noticed that some records for countries are not necessarily associated with a reference, for example Pheidole pallidula for Switzerland. I would like to know if those data come from personal observations or from interpolation based on known distribution?

Hi Benoit!

First of all, yes, the work is huge, but once the site is developed, my work is much more easy now.

All of the listings are based on bibliographical records, except where a working group is developed. By now this happens to Iberian Peninsula, Morocco and Macaronesia.

In the case of Switzerland, it's cited at Seifert's "Die Ameisen Mittel- und Noreuropas"

We are working in a database to show all of this records. We expect to have it ready in two months from now

By the way, Which site are you working in?

Thanks for your answer.

I have been working on the development of a global generic database for ants for a year and half. So I have tried to find as much records as I could for each ant genus by political entities. For the moment, it is not a website, but might come on Internet at some point. However, the database is finish now (at least to allow us to run analysis and write a few papers). Of course it will never be finished, because new records that we might have missed will show up; people will contact us to improve it (I hope) and we will discover new species/genera in areas for which we don't have data yet.


At the origin, I did not have real questions behind this project, only curiosity of knowing where were the distribution of the different genera (I did not even plan to make it globally). However, quickly, while the database was growing, and I was making the first set of maps, ideas started to grown. And from discussion to discussion with different myrmecologists, I have realized that people might have several interests related to those maps. So a few thousands hours after I started, a few thousands articles/books read, and a lot of E-mail later, I have been able to gather some interesting data together.

I appreciate the information provided by your website because it has provided me with some of the data I have used (when I started I have used your data for Spain and Portugal) and now it allows me to confront how many I might have missed (fortunately for me, it was really few). Your website, like many others have made my work easier (but not easy!). Thank you.

Wow, I'm really shocked!

My fellow Angel Barrera and me are just now working with the same idea. We are developing a web-based program that will be a module into formicidae.org. This program will let the users to curate their own collections at the site, and the data will be offered via maps or database listings or downloads. We are now defining the project, and will have it ready in one or two months max. We'll appreciate any suggestion on the database structure, guidance, whatever.

The final goal should be to share all of this data via GBIF or similar, so, Do you know any standar to use? Is there any database out there that we can use now?

I think that things are moving really fast to a "Worlwide database" where any taxonomist con share their data. The results should be amazing, beyond what I can think of now. And will affect biogeography at least, but taxonomy for sure.

Thanks a lot for your time, and plesae, keep me updated!