An Australian university is developing a centralised portal to better fill in knowledge gaps around bee data across underreported jurisdictions like Asia and Africa, a move expected to aid in data collection and conservation efforts.
It is hoped that simplifying workflow to understand where bees are and in what number will be a bedrock for wider biodiversity analysis and understanding of crop failure and loss of native plant diversity given their centrality to most ecosystems.
A group of researchers published the article ‘A globally synthesised and flagged bee occurrence dataset and cleaning workflow’ on their work in Scientific Data on Wednesday.
Flinders University in South Australia has called its product BeeBCD and said it brings together over 18 million bee occurrence records from public and private databases to “improve accuracy and accessibility of species data from around the world for future conservation, research, and farming management”.
The offering is open access so anyone can access and use the information rather than just the ‘mega-labs’ at wealthy institutions, the paper’s authors said.
It is an occurrence data cleaning package and is a “new ‘arsenal’ for entomologists and other experts to quickly and reliably mobilise occurrence datasets,” Flinders University bee expert Dr. James Dorey said.
“We hope this ‘democratisation’ of a consistent reference point for species occurrence data will be an example for other such projects to follow.”
“We already have researchers around the world using BeeBDC and the database to examine important continental and clade-wide questions connected to bee-plant and bee-environment interactions, impacts of invasive species, and broad bee ecology and evolution,” he continued.
Asia and Africa are under-represented in data collection despite the high diversity of bee species and it is hoped a central portal could assist in higher rates of reporting from important regions that remain under-funded.
Another of the paper’s authors, Dr. Neil Cobb of the Biodiversity Outreach Network, said the project provided “a significant contribution to address the ‘Wallacean Shortfall’ … so we can begin to understand their evolutionary biogeography and better inform conservation efforts”.
“We need to widen and increase our collective efforts to reduce the impacts of human activities on our environments to improve outcomes for communities around the world.”
There have been many varied efforts across the planet to leverage the big data of bees. In 2015 Australia’s scientific body the CSIRO in collaboration with other institutions was drugging bees so scientists could physically attach tiny tracers and transmitters to each one.
By Helen Clark – helen@carbon-pulse.com
