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

Risk assessments are fundamental to invasive species management and are underpinned by comprehensive characterization of invasive species impacts. Our understanding of the impacts of invasive species is growing constantly, and several recently developed frameworks offer the opportunity to systematically categorize environmental and socio-economic impacts of invasive species. Invasive ants are among the most widespread and damaging invaders. We provide a global, comprehensive assessment on the impacts of ants and propose a priority list of risk species. We used the Socio-Economic Impact Classification for Alien Taxa (SEICAT), Environmental Impact Classification for Alien Taxa (EICAT) and Generic Impact Scoring System (GISS) to analyse 642 unique sources for 100 named species. This dataset includes the raw recrods on which our assessments were based, and some summary data. Other data can be found in the publication.

Methods
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.