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.

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.

README

The Refs.ris file contains the library of citations used to generate the dataset.

The raw SEICAT, EICAT and GISS records are in the SEICAT_EICAT_GISS workbook.

The Definitions worksheet in the SEICAT_EICAT_GISS workbook describes all the fields in the other worksheets.

The Manuscript Data workbook contains two supplementary Tables for the publication (Table S3 and Table S4).

Table legends are:

Table S3: Ant species ranked by Generic Impact Scoring System (GISS) (Nentwig et al. 2016), ordered by maximum GISS score. 

Table S4: Checklist of named ant species lists from sources referred to in the study (239 species). X indicates the species is present on the list. SEICAT = Socio‐Economic Impact Classification for Alien Taxa (Bacher et al. 2018), EICAT = Environmental Impact Classification for Alien Taxa. (Hawkins et al. 2015), GISS = the Generic Impact Scoring System (Nentwig et al. 2016); GISD = Global Invasive Species Database.