Hey ant friends!
I work for a small, Illinois-based nonprofit that specializes in restoring post-agricultural and post-industrial land back into native ecosystems. We're called The Wetlands Initiative.
Our "crown jewel" project is the Dixon Waterfowl Refuge, a former farm along the Illinois River we've restored over 17 years into an amazing, biodiverse, open-to-the-public nature preserve. This August we held a BioBlitz and so far we've recorded over 884 species!
However, we've got no ant experts on staff and a lot of ants left to identify! We used iNaturalist to collect participant observations, which requires two agreeing species-level identifications from two separate users to be considered "research grade". Can you help us identify some of these ants?
If this isn't the right place for this, please let me know, and thank you for your expertise!
