DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5722445
title: Big Bee indexed biotic interactions and review summary

description: <strong>Extending Anthophila research through image and trait digitization (Big-Bee) indexed biotic interactions and review summary.</strong> 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 sustaining 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 project began in 2021 and is funded by the National Science Foundation to mobilize data about worldwide bee species to data aggregators (e.g., iDigBio, GBIF). The Big-Bee Thematic Collection Network (Big-Bee) 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 is the first archive of Big-Bee data indexed by Global Biotic Interactions (GloBI). GloBI provides open access to finding species interaction data (e.g., predator-prey, pollinator-plant, pathogen-host, parasite-host) by combining existing open datasets using open-source software. This version of the Big Bee dataset includes interactions that are not just bees. Also in this version, the datasets included in this publication are specifically those institutions in the Big Bee project network and do not represent all bee interaction data found at Global Biotic Interactions. <strong>Bee Library Information - Statistics about Big Bee data providers</strong> The specimens indexed by GloBI are also found on the Bee Library. To date, the number of specimens and images in the library are listed below. The Bee Library taxonomic backbone is not yet complete, so information regarding the number of species is not yet available. 1,147,415 occurrence records 936,087 (82%) georeferenced 306,242 (27%) occurrences imaged Collection Specimens Georeferenced Imaged Interactions Indexed in GloBI (all) Interactions Indexed in GloBI (bees) ASU Hasbrouck Insect Collection - Bee Records 4943 4943 0 6214 604 Bee Biology and Systematics Laboratory USDA-ARS Pollinating Insect-Biology Management Systematics Research 561820 547461 0 0 0 California Academy of Sciences 805 254 0 15407 92 California Academy of Sciences - Type Collection 1838 52 77 0 0 Essig Museum of Entomology University of California Berkeley 58490 54965 0 0 0 Florida State Collection of Arthropods 1 0 0 0 Museum of Comparative Zoology Harvard University 9709 9481 495 4046 18 Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County 1 0 0 0 San Diego Natural History Museum Entomology Department 2153 1612 0 7021 8 USGS Native Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab 98 98 0 0 0 University of California Santa Barbara Invertebrate Zoology Collection 7033 6781 1278 1663 402 University of Colorado Museum of Natural History Entomology Collection 18043 18043 0 9589 4719 University of Kansas Natural History Museum Entomology Division 464795 275004 304392 0 0 University of Michigan Museum of Zoology Division of Insects 1 0 94489 9649 University of New Hampshire Donald S. Chandler Entomological Collection 17685 17393 0 3137 3101 <strong>Names</strong> <strong>SpecimenCount</strong> <strong>GeorefCount</strong> <strong>GeorefPercent</strong> Andrenidae 192034 175698 91 Apidae 429537 311637 73 Colletidae 63652 47538 75 Halictidae 249081 216755 87 Megachilidae 199354 171859 86 Melittidae 11646 10751 92 Stenotritidae 22 22 100 Names SpecimenCount GeorefCount GeorefPercent [Higher geography: has not been verified and entered] 168 0 0 Afghanistan 1005 474 47 Albania 7 3 43 Algeria 183 86 47 Andorra 6 3 50 Angola 782 705 90 Antigua and Barbuda 3 3 100 Argentina 21973 14020 64 Arizona 1 0 0 Armenia 48 25 52 Aruba 2 2 100 Australia 11317 1961 17 Austria 4693 1214 26 Azerbaijan 34 30 88 Bahamas 125 36 29 Bangladesh 7 2 29 BAR 3 3 100 Barbados 5 4 80 Belgium 37 31 84 Belize 340 304 89 Benin 8 8 100 Bermuda 1 0 0 Bhutan 10 6 60 Bolivia 16161 7268 45 Bosnia and Herzegovina 51 2 4 Botswana 71 43 61 Brasil 3 2 67 Brazil 27652 16458 60 British Virgin Islands 3 2 67 Brunei 18 1 6 Bulgaria 803 492 61 Burkina Faso 8 0 0 Burundi 5 0 0 California 2 0 0 Cambodia 2 0 0 Cameroon 1124 65 6 Canada 14905 14077 94 Cape Verde 19 7 37 Central African Republic 116 97 84 Chad 5 0 0 CHILE 4 4 100 Chile 10950 4575 42 CHINA 34 33 97 China 692 368 53 Christmas Island 3 0 0 Colombia 5994 2563 43 Commonwealth of the Bahamas 31 5 16 Comoros 3 0 0 Congo 1 1 100 Congo the Democratic Republic of the 1 0 0 COS 2 2 100 Costa Rica 38007 30178 79 Croatia 713 462 65 Cuba 307 144 47 Cyprus 514 351 68 Czech Republic 4594 2789 61 Democratic Republic of Congo 55 41 75 Democratic Republic of the Congo 685 272 40 Denmark 27 12 44 Dominica 5 1 20 Dominican Republic 30 9 30 Ecuador 3967 2534 64 Ecuador/Peru 3 3 100 Egypt 1494 889 60 El Salvador 358 142 40 Eritrea 3 0 0 Estonia 1 0 0 Ethiopia 81 20 25 Federated States of Micronesia 3 1 33 Fiji 7 0 0 Fiji Islands 277 57 21 Finland 284 177 62 Florida 16 16 100 France 739 705 95 French Guiana 6748 2568 38 French Polynesia 35 23 66 Gabon 121 16 13 Gambia 7 3 43 Georgia 6 6 100 Germany 455 257 56 Ghana 111 40 36 Great Britain 5179 5081 98 Greece 2004 1823 91 Greenland 2 0 0 Grenada 4 2 50 Guadeloupe 35 35 100 Guatemala 1503 1085 72 Guernsey 5 0 0 Guyana 837 720 86 Haiti 22 18 82 Holland 4 0 0 Honduras 1012 658 65 Hong Kong 63 4 6 Hungary 473 443 94 Iceland 13 0 0 Idaho 1 0 0 India 6223 4297 69 Indonesia 1994 1005 50 Iran 9186 6564 71 Iran Islamic Republic of 2 2 100 Iraq 34 0 0 Ireland 7 0 0 Israel 711 100 14 Italy 1182 1117 95 Ivory Coast 6 3 50 Jamaica 296 1 0 Japan 749 159 21 Jordan 122 38 31 Kazakhstan 210 14 7 Kenya 2462 228 9 Korea 2 0 0 Kuwait 6 0 0 Kyrgyzstan 193 152 79 Lao Peoples Democratic Republic 4 4 100 Laos 7 0 0 Latvia 1 0 0 Lebanon 199 122 61 Lesotho 24 3 13 Liberia 190 12 6 Libya 90 22 24 Liechtenstein 1 0 0 Lithuania 104 6 6 Macao 2 0 0 Macedonia 150 0 0 Madagascar 3638 2078 57 Maine 22 22 100 Malawi 1202 18 1 Malaysia 3041 876 29 Maldives 32 24 75 Mali 19 2 11 Martinique 9 2 22 Massachusetts 2 2 100 Mauritius 16 5 31 Mexico 62070 37536 60 Missouri 8 0 0 Mongolia 202 115 57 Montana 1 0 0 Montenegro 2 0 0 Montserrat 25 2 8 Morocco 567 46 8 Mozambique 489 2 0 Myanmar 117 94 80 N. S. 3 3 100 N.S. 3 3 100 Namibia 375 115 31 Nepal 140 45 32 Netherlands
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