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ViewAttendees 16

SysEB

10-Minute Paper

10-Min: SysEB, Biodiversity, Conservation and Pollination

The Oregon Bee Altas: Statewide inventory of native bees with volunteer master melittologists

On-Demand
On-Demand
Citizen science has grown in popularity, but has had limited success inventorying insect biodiversity. Typically, volunteer effort and records become disorganized, verifications backlogged and observations lost, causing the survey program to collapse. 
The Oregon Bee Atlas was founded in 2017 and structured around five activities: (1) training motivated citizen scientists in bee survey, (2) a strategic inventory goal spanning the region, (3) a mechanism for extracting high-quality observations and records from survey efforts, (4) a mechanism to screen or vet new records for relevancy and accuracy and (5) connectivity to authoritative taxonomy. 
The Atlas initially faced issues similar to birding-based citizen science projects in that it had a high number of ‘dabblers’ who only episodically collected, producing few specimens, virtually all of which were common species. By modifying and intensifying our training in 2019 and transitioning the volunteer program to a Master Certificate program in 2020 we have doubled the number of volunteers submitting larger collections and have increased the scientific significance of the bees collected. 
To date, the Master Melittologists have collected over 70,000 museum-quality specimens covering every county in Oregon. This includes more than 500 species, including three genera not previously recorded from Oregon, dozens of new state species records, introduced species, and genera and species not recorded for decades in the state. Most of these specimens were captured when the bee was visiting flowers, resulting in a database of host-plant photo-vouchers that provides an unprecedented view of the plant-pollinator networks at a state level.