The files contain sequences and collection information from a project on barcoding South African ants. Parts of the collections were done for this purpose while other samples were derived from different ant projects in which the author was involved during her stay at the CIB. Additional samples were received as donations by other researchers. The data can be combined with the diversity and trait information collected in those projects. This includes the two long-term monitoring projects - the Iimbovane Outreach project and the Cederberg Altitudinal Transect Project (aka Coast to Karoo Transect) - and projects using the same study sites. Sequencing of samples took place at the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario at the University of Guelph as this project was in collaboration with the international Barcoding of Life Initiative and its South African collaborators. The data thus is also stored in the Barcoding of Life Database and Aggregate files of the project's data have been compiled using the web tools of this database. Voucher specimens are stored in the collection of the CIB at Stellenbosch University.

The main intentions were to provide a first attempt at a phylogeny for ongoing ant projects at the CIB, test morphospecies hypotheses from these projects, and provide future researchers with an additional identification tool (the data is publicily accessable via the Barcoding of Life Database. While South Africa has a long history of ant research, a large portion of it's ant species are not yet named, distributions and intraspecific variation are often poorly known, and keys - where existing - are often not to modern standards and outdated. This makes ant identification challenging and lowers the possibility to combine data from different projects. The new tool of DNABarcoding may thus help adopt this ecologically important group more frequently in research and conservation work.