Bees provide essential ecosystem services as the most important pollinators of crops and wild plants, so reported losses of bees and their interactions with plants are of great concern worldwide. A robust status assessment for pollinators has been identified as a top scientific priority and requires compilation of comprehensive and accurate baseline data on bee occurence and floral associations. The Collaborative Databasing of North American Bee Collections Within a Global Informatics Network project uses open-source web-based tools (fig. 1) to capture specimen label data from historical and recent bee specimens residing in ten North American bee collections, disseminates these data to the public through maps and species pages on biodiversity portals, and to researchers to serve as the basis for diverse peer-reviewed research publications.

The project used web-based tools to initiate or expand databasing at ten bee collections in multiple states from California to New England, leading to compilation of more than 1,000,000 bee specimen records with worldwide representation (fig. 2) and intensive coverage of all regions of North America (fig. 3). All project records were integrated and displayed on online global maps together with more the 2,000,000 additional bee occurrence records from other global datasets (fig. 4). Our primary biodiversity portal Discover Life works with project leaderrs to develop innovative tools to dynamically error-check all records to ensure reliability, e.g., that all taxonomic names match authoritative checklists and that geographic coordinates are consistent with reported localities. Once validated, specimen records are used by project participants and diverse partners as the basis for conservation assessments, taxonomic revisions, faunal surveys, maps in identification guides, and analyses of the response of bee populations to global change. Occurrened data assembled by the project has been a major source of data for IUCN Bumble Bee Working group status assessment and was also the main principal source for statistical analyses comparing the response of bees and their host plants to climatic warming and providing the first assessment of historical changes in the bee fauna of the northeastern United States. Project data corroborated severe declines of certain bumble bees, including socially parasitic species, while demonstrating persistence of many other bees, including many native pollinators of crops. To track the establishment and dramatic increase in exotic bee species data capture for these from both their native and introduced ranges was prioritized. To date, species pages with maps and synonyms have been assembled by project leaders for nearly all of the world's 20,000 bee species, and georeferenced specimen records have been captured for more than 7100 bee species worldwide and for more than 1200 bee-flower associations. The number of bee species with specimen records from project collections is more than twice the number of described bee species recorded from the United States and Canada (3500 species). Maps, images, names and other data for all world bee species can be  accessed online through image-rich species pages for bees (fig. 5) with links to species pages for their host plants.

Specimen records and images from this project have been particularly accessible to the public because these are updated each night (not once or occasionally) to our primary biodiversity portal Discover Life and from there are served as maps to Encyclopedia of Life. The project makes full use of the specimen records, for example by compiling all bee-flower associations found in project datasets. These are crucial for understanding the pollination services of bees and their conservation needs. Geographic data provided by the new specimen records is used to customize widely-used ...

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