New Ant Maps!

Benoit Guenard has been hard at work the past couple years compiling broad-scale distribution data for all the world's ants, and his efforts are now online.  Here they are- global range maps for all the ant genera:

http://www.antmacroecology.org/ant_genera/index.html

These maps will be a very useful resource, especially if the myrmecological community participates to add new records and vet the occasional error.

One thought, though, is that large umbrella strategies such as this will eventually be redundant with antweb.org.   Antweb's distributions are built from accumulated individual specimen records, and so hold the original data on which all maps are based. But as specimen records must be laboriously added one by one, antweb's data remains spotty and very incomplete.  So obsolescence for antmacroecology.org's maps likely won't happen for a good while yet.