Antkey

ID guide | introduced ants

Welcome to the development of Antkey

Welcome! This is the second day of development for Antkey, so don't be too disappointed that there is much content up. I plan to have the site ready for full use within four months. By then Antkey will feature a fully illustrated Lucid Key, an illustrated glossary, comparison charts and species pages.

I am very much hoping that this can be a community website that can facilitate the contribution of folks interested in invasive ant reasearch. Antkey is a Scratchpad project. Scratchpads runs on a Drupal core. And Drupal is a great platform for developing online communities. In other words, sign-up now!

Some other features that I am considering adding are a forum, a specimen database, and a distribution database. The forum could be a place where folks can post questions, images and videos of ants they need help id'ing, and the Antkey community can all help identify them. The specimen database can be an online repository for introduced ant specimens contributed by the community. The distribution database can be aim to aggregrate the most up to date locality records of introduced ant populations. Both the specimen and distribution databases can include categories to distinguish among different record type (i.e. observed specimens vs. literature records) and identification confidence (i.e. type specimen vs. specimens compared with types vs. specimens that require more scrutiny). 

I'll try and keep a log of the updates here, but I really encourage folks to sign up for an account, introduce themselves, and help build the site!

blog/forum keywords: 
Scratchpads developed and conceived by (alphabetical): Ed Baker, Katherine Bouton Alice Heaton Dimitris Koureas, Laurence Livermore, Dave Roberts, Simon Rycroft, Ben Scott, Vince Smith