ABSTRACT

Declining populations of bees impact plant-pollinator interactions in both natural and agricultural systems. While bees and other insects pollinate most wild plants, and are critical to sustain a large proportion of global food production, they are decreasing in both numbers and diversity. Our understanding of the factors driving these declines is limited because we lack sufficient data on the distribution of bee species, and on the behavioral and anatomical traits that may make them either vulnerable or resilient to human-induced environmental changes, such as habitat loss and climate change. Fortunately, wild bees have been collected by researchers and deposited in natural history collections for over 100 years, retaining a wealth of associated attributes that can be extracted from specimen images. This project will digitally capture data and images from these historic specimens, develop tools to measure bee traits from these images, and generate a comprehensive bee trait and image dataset to measure changes through time. This will increase our understanding of specific traits that put bee species at risk of decline - a critical need for both sustaining our agricultural economy and the conservation of our natural resources. In addition, the large image datasets created by this project can be used for new artificial intelligence identification tools that will help improve our future pollinator observation and monitoring efforts.

The Big-Bee Thematic Collection Network (Big-Bee TCN) will create over one million high-resolution 2D and 3D images of bee specimens, representing over 5,000 worldwide bee species, including all of the major pollinating species of the United States. The Big-Bee network includes 13 institutions and partnerships with US government agencies. Novel mechanisms for sharing image datasets will be developed and datasets of bee traits will be available through an open data portal, the Bee Library, for research and education. The Big-Bee project will engage the general public in research through community science via crowdsourcing trait measurements and data transcription from images. In addition, training and professional development for natural history collection staff, researchers, and university students in data science will be provided through the creation and implementation of workshops focusing on bee traits and species identification. All data resulting from this award will be shared with and publicly available through the national digitized biocollections resource, iDigBio.org.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

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