Project:

Improving the Accuracy of Ant Species by Non-Experts

Students:

Alexandra Cavallone, Mia Padula, Victoria Caputo, Ananya Bhardwaj

School:

St. Dominic High School,

Mentors:

Pamela Shanley

Abstract:

This proposal is about how iNaturalist and DNA Barcoding increase the accuracy of ants diversity estimates by non-experts. Ants have characteristics that can be challenging to non-experts because many species only differ by subtle characteristics. We can do this by iNaturalists and DNA Barcoding. iNaturalists allows non-experts to learn about the identification of a species and records organisms occurrence. In addition, DNA Barcoding can assist in identifying a species using a short, standardized DNA sequence from a specific region of an organism's genome. Therefore, for the project we will test an ant family and use iNaturalist and DNA Barcoding to show how they improve the accuracy of identifying ant species by non-experts.

Poster:

Team samples: