Socio-economic and environmental impacts of ants: data to support global assessments

The dataset was constructed from a literature research. To identify peer-reviewed information sources for our analyses, we conducted systematic and exhaustive searches of literature published in English prior to March 2019 in Web of Science, JSTOR, Google Scholar, and FORMIS, a curated database of all ant literature (Wojcik and Porter 2018). In our search terms we used “ant” with the additional key words “sting”, “bite”, “damage”, “cost*” and “impact*”. The resulting records were assessment using the Environmental Impact Classification for Alien Taxa [EICAT], Hawkins et al. 2015; the Generic Impact Scoring System [GISS], Nentwig et al. 2016; and the Socio-Economic Impact Classification for Alien Taxa [SEICAT] Bacher et al. 2018.