I am generating occurence maps for North American ant species. This is an iterative process that involves generating occurence maps for ant species and getting feedback on errors/successes in taxonomic, identification, and geo-references from ant biologists. Errors exist. I have not yet generated the map legends, but closed circles represent museum specimen, open circles publication references, greyed in political areas represent a specimen or publication that is not geo-referenced but known to occur within the boundaries of that political entity. This project is in collaboration with Rob Dunn at NCSU and Nate Sanders at Tennessee, but the errors in the maps linked below are mine.Please email me at mdweiser@ncsu.edu if you have questions, comments, corrections, or additional occurence data.
This research was supported by the Office of Science (BER), U.S. Department of Energy, PER Grant No. DE-FG02-08ER64510 and a NICCR award to RR Dunn and NJ Sanders.

Section 1- Poneromorph Species
Section 2- Formicomorph Species
Section 3- Myrmicinae Part 1 Attini to Myrmicini
Section 3- Myrmicinae Part 2 Pheidolini to Stenammini
Section 4- Ecitoninae
Section 5- Pseudomymecinae

The AODB is a database of georeferenced ant occurences. Using data taken directly from museum specimen, available electronic databases, publications. The fundamental unit of the database is the individual observation of an ant species at a place and time. There are currently 128,018 observations in the database. These data are used to generate range maps (see above) as well as models of spatial patterns of diversity. The AODB is stored as a MySQL database and is accessible via a PHP front end. Collaborators: Rob Dunn, Nate Sanders, Jessie Allen, Matt Fitzpatrick, Benoit Guénard, Ed Laurent, J.-P. Lessard, David Lubertazzi & Sean Menke. You can browse the tables at this link (use the user and password "guest".
This research was supported by the Office of Science (BER), U.S. Department of Energy, PER Grant No. DE-FG02-08ER64510 and a NICCR award to RR Dunn and NJ Sanders.





We (Rob Dunn, Jim Hunt, and myself) are databasing the collections of Dr. Mary Talbot, a pioneering ant ecologist. Jim Hunt (quite literally) rescued this invaluable collection from the garbage bin. Representing more than 30 years of collections focused in the midwest United States, this collection includes most of the specimen representing decades of collections from the E.S. George Reserve in Michigan. There are also original field and laboratory notes, maps of nest occurences, multiyear phenology data, and extensive species natural history notes by Dr. Talbot. While we have much of Talbot's career product in our lab, we know very little about Dr. Talbot. If you have any biographical information about Dr. Talbot, please contact us. For more information, see the Talbot Collection Project Webpage





The SALVIAS database (AKA GSALAD) is a global database of plant occurrences. The database includes geo-referenced individual occurences (e.g., from herbarium specimen) as well as ecological collections-- observations of multiple individuals and species at a single point and time. SALVIAS currently includes more than 4,000 individual surveys and several million geo-referenced occurences of individual plants. You can find salvias at this link . Salvias was created in collaboration with Brian Enquist, Brad Boyle and Nate Swenson. This research was supported by the Center for Applied Biodiversity Science at Conservation International.











Sundry useful things

• BENTITIES!
• BENTITIES 2009!

1. Here is the provinces shape file I use for many applications
   
2. Here is a vector grid of the Western Hemisphere by 1 degree grid cells.
3. Here are shape files for global and terrestrial Equal-Area Icosohedrons (Aperture 4 Scale 7 Hexagon, each cell has ~3,113km²) built from the .gen files at Discrete Global Grids website
   
4. Here are shape files for global and terrestrial Equal-Area Icosohedron (Aperture 4 Scale 6 Hexagons, each cell has ~12,452km²; compare to 12,321 km² for a one degree grid cell at the equator) built from the .gen files at Discrete Global Grids website.
   
   
   
   
   
   Instructions for generating the shape files of Icosohedral Equal Area Grid Cells.
   1. download the resolution and shape you want from the ISEA DDG's website. This file will be *.gen, an ARC INFO generate file.
   2. PAINFUL STEP THAT I AM NOT QUALIFIED TO AUTOMATE- open the *.gen file in a text editor and delete each set of coordinates that represents a hexagon that crosses the 180degree meridian (and thus has positive and negative longitudes. Failure to do so causes the BUILD command below to create horizontal lines across the map in a flat prohection from the western negative values to the eastern postitive values). This is not fun.
   3. Open Arc Info
   4. type "w path_to_directory" example "w D:\dggs\iseas\"
   5. type "generate newfilename" example "generate isea4h6". This is the new "empty file you are gonna put the data into.
   6. type "input *.gen" then hit return. example "input isea4h6.gen"
   7. type "polygons" then hit return (that is, if you want polygons)
   8. type "quit" to clear the generate command
   9. type "BUILD newfilename" and if that messes up type "CLEAN newfilename"
   10. look for the new file in directory you set as the workspace as w above
   or just use the ones I've made above