The state of Pará in northern Brazil is located entirely within the Amazon Basin and harbors a great diversity of landscape and vegetation types that support high levels of biodiversity. Here, we provide a comprehensive inventory of ant species and their distribution in Pará. This regional list is based on an extensive review of species records from published and unpublished sources covering a period of 134 years (1886–2020) and includes the five most representative ant collections in Brazil. In total, we documented 12 subfamilies, 90 genera and 753 ant species, including 97 species recorded for the first time in Pará and 12 species newly reported in Brazil. Sampling effort across the state is highly uneven, and most records may be associated with research areas near the state capital, mining areas, hydroelectric dams, and research field stations run by the state or universities. In addition, our results suggest a strong bias in ant collection in Pará in terms of proximity of sampled sites to access routes, such as roads and rivers. We also found that species records were highly unevenly distributed based on areas of endemism within the Amazon, vegetation type, and protected areas within the state. Ant surveys are still lacking from most protected areas of Pará, and further sampling is urgently needed in view of the current trend of expansion of major infrastructure projects and natural resource harvesting within protected areas of Pará. Our database represents an extremely valuable and rich source of information for further studies on ant biodiversity and conservation in the Amazon Basin.

Despite the historical efforts to list and organize the taxonomic knowledge about the Brazilian ant fauna, the most diverse in the world, several gaps regarding species distribution data and sampling coverage persist. In an attempt to fill some of these gaps, we here apply a scientometric approach to provide an updated overview of the ants of Brazil based on formal publications on ant diversity in the Brazilian territory. In the last 50 years, ant diversity studies in Brazil revealed 1130 species, corresponding to around 70% of the species known to occur in the country. The Brazilian biomes with the highest number of described species recorded were, respectively, the Amazon Forest (716 species), Atlantic Forest (657 species), Cerrado (389 species), Caatinga (185 species), Pantanal (143 species), and Pampa (86 species). Considering the number and frequency of unidentified species, the genera Azteca, Hypoponera, Pheidole, and Solenopsis represent the main knowledge frontiers regarding taxonomic resolution, with more than 80% of their records associated with morphospecies codes in diversity studies in Brazil. Moreover, around 7.5% of the papers presented inconsistences in their species lists regarding the validity of taxonomic names, and we found studies for which some taxa records are geographically implausible. Besides demonstrating the importance of ecological publications to the ant diversity knowledge in Brazil, our findings highlight a strong sampling bias in ant occurrence data in the country, with species records unevenly distributed across Brazilian biomes. In short, our results constitute valuable information for future projects on ant taxonomy and surveying in Brazilian natural areas.

Ants, an ecologically successful and numerically dominant group of animals, play key ecological roles as soil engineers, predators, nutrient recyclers, and regulators of plant growth and reproduction in most terrestrial ecosystems. Further, ants are widely used as bioindicators of the ecological impact of land use. We gathered information of ant species in the Atlantic Forest of South America. The ATLANTIC ANTS data set, which is part of the ATLANTIC SERIES data papers, is a compilation of ant records from collections (18,713 records), unpublished data (29,651 records), and published sources (106,910 records; 1,059 references), including papers, theses, dissertations, and book chapters published from 1886 to 2020. In total, the data set contains 153,818 ant records from 7,636 study locations in the Atlantic Forest, representing 10 subfamilies, 99 genera, 1,114 ant species identified with updated taxonomic certainty, and 2,235 morphospecies codes. Our data set reflects the heterogeneity in ant records, which include ants sampled at the beginning of the taxonomic history of myrmecology (the 19th and 20th centuries) and more recent ant surveys designed to address specific questions in ecology and biology. The data set can be used by researchers to develop strategies to deal with different macroecological and region‐wide questions, focusing on assemblages, species occurrences, and distribution patterns. Furthermore, the data can be used to assess the consequences of changes in land use in the Atlantic Forest on different ecological processes. No copyright restrictions apply to the use of this data set, but we request that authors cite this data paper when using these data in publications or teaching events.

Research findings in natural sciences need to be comparable and reproducible to effectively improve our understanding of ecological and behavioural patterns. In this sense, knowledge frontiers in biodiversity studies are directly tied to taxonomic research, especially in species-rich tropical regions. Here we analysed the taxonomic information available in 470 studies on Brazilian ant diversity published in the last 50 years. We aimed to quantify the proportion of studies that provide enough data to validate taxonomic identification, explore the frequency of studies that properly acknowledge their taxonomic background, and investigate the primary resources for ant identification in Brazil. We found that most studies on Brazilian ant diversity (73.6%) explicitly stated the methods used to identify their specimens. However, the proportion of papers that provide complete data for the repository institutions and vouchered specimens is vanishingly small (5.8%). Additionally, only 40.0% of the studies consistently presented taxon authorities and years of description, rarely referencing taxonomic publications correctly. In turn, the number of specialists and institutions consulted for ant identification in Brazil has increased in the last years, along with the number of studies that explicitly provide their taxonomic procedures for ant identification. Our findings highlight a shift between generations regarding the recognition of taxonomy as fundamental science, deepening our understanding of biodiversity.