Project:

Biodiversity of Ants in New York City Parks

Students:

Caroline Neuer, Gianna Perez, Aneliz Rodriguez

School:

Frank McCourt HS, Manhattan

Mentors:

Dora Miklos

Abstract:

New York City hosts a wide variety of life in its biodiverse urban ecosystem. Urban ecosystems like New York are unique, as Freelance Science, Environmental, and Legal Journalist Richard Blaustein states, these cities “are revitalizing the potential for biodiversity (Blaustein, 2013).” This contributes to important biodiversity in modern environments throughout the world. Biodiversity is defined as the variety of all living organisms in a particular ecosystem (Hancock). Ants are important to our biodiversity since, as explained by Joseph Parker from the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering at the California Institute of Technology and Daniel J. C. Kronauer from the Laboratory of Social Evolution and Behavior at Rockefeller University, “ants exert impacts on other biota that are unmatched by most animal clades,” meaning ants have shaped most of our terrestrial biodiversity today (Parker & Kronauer, 2021). Ants help to cultivate our ecosystem “through their interactio

Poster:

Team samples: