D3311: Big-Bee: An initiative to promote understanding of bees through image and trait digitization

While bees are critical to sustaining a large proportion of global food production, as well as pollinating both wild and cultivated plants, 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 to predict changes in their geographic range under climate change scenarios. Additionally lacking is adequate data on the behavioral and anatomical traits that may make bees either vulnerable or resilient to human-induced environmental changes. Fortunately, a wealth of associated attributes can be extracted from the specimens deposited in natural history collections for over 100 years.

Extending Anthophila Research Through Image and Trait Digitization (Big-Bee) is a newly funded US National Science Foundation Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections project. Over the course of three years, we will create high-resolution 2D and 3D images of bee specimens representing over 5,000 worldwide bee species, including most of the major pollinating species. We will develop tools to measure bee traits from images and generate comprehensive bee trait and image datasets to measure changes through time. We are developing novel mechanisms for sharing image datasets and datasets of bee traits that will be available through an open data portal called the Bee Library. In addition, biotic interaction and species association data will be shared via Global Biotic Interactions. The Big-Bee project will engage the public in research through community science via crowdsourcing trait measurements and data transcription from images.