Comparing ant morphology measurements from microscope and online AntWeb.org 2D z-stacked images

Unprecedented technological advances in digitization and the steadily expanding open-access digital repositories are yielding new opportunities to quickly and efficiently measure morphological traits without transportation and advanced/expensive microscope machinery. A prime example is the AntWeb.org database, which allows researchers from all over the world to study taxonomic, ecological, or evolutionary questions on the same ant specimens with ease. However, the reproducibility and reliability of morphometric data deduced from AntWeb compared to traditional microscope measurements has not yet been tested.
Here, we compared 12 morphological traits of 46 Temnothorax ant specimens measured either directly by stereomicroscope on physical specimens or via the widely used open access software tpsDig utilizing AntWeb digital images. We employed a complex statistical framework to test several aspects of reproducibility and reliability between the methods. We estimated (i) the agreement betwee..., ,