Brazil is the world center of ant biodiversity. However, it is a hard task to obtain ecological information about ant species with occurrence range within the country, since this data is usually scattered among several sources (from field books to online databases). In order to facilitate the survey and access to ecological data of Brazilian ant species, we developed BAH!, to aggregated in a single platform relevant information of Brazilian ants that can be useful in several fields of myrmecology.
Our platform provides information on habitat-use of ants in Brazil. In the Neotropical region and in Brazil, ants have diversified mainly in forest habitats (forest specialists), but other species are able to inhabit forests and also open habitats (generalist ants), and a few species are exclusively found in open habitats (open-habitat specialists).
These habitat-use guilds respond differently along ecological and environmental gradients and land-use changes and have been used as complementary predictable parameter on community ecology and bioindication research. However, so far, a drawback in this approach is the lack of quickly accessible information on habitat-use of ants.
Now, with BAH!, your troubles are over! We offer updated information on habitat-use for hundreds of ant species from Brazil! Our intention is to add more relevant ecological information about ants in the near future, including microhabitat, biome occurrence, ecosystem function, etc. To achieve these goals, we would like to invite you to join our team to build the biggest free access database on ecological information of Brazilian ants.