ABOUT IDIGBEES

The overarching goal of iDigBees is to mobilize and help make all bee data publicly accessible for research and educational purposes on a global scale.

As you may imagine, this is a monumental endeavor with about 20,000 different bee species in seven taxonomic families described globally and more than 32 million bee specimens with data to capture estimated to be in collections around the world.

In our effort to mobilize and make all data available on a global scale, we are starting locally with projects based in North America and extending to South America. There are an estimated 4,000 bee species in the US (3,154 documented so far), ca. 3,000 species in Mexico, and ca. 5,000 species in South America.

iDigBees supports and facilitates a number of different projects that all contribute to our greater goal of global bee data mobilization and accessibility:

iDigBees TCN
This is an NSF funded project that focuses on digitally capturing and sharing the locality and determination data physically located on bee specimen labels housed in museums across the United States. This “dark data” is essential for research in conservation efforts, to agricultural practices, to invasive species control.

Lightning Bug
This project is focused on developing new technologies to more quickly and efficiently capture label data on museum specimens through semi-automated label transcription and 3D photogrammetric specimen imaging. With tens of millions of bee records still to be digitized, we need technological assistance if we want to achieve our goals within our lifespans.

SCAN (Symbiota Collections of Arthropods Network)
All the data needs to go somewhere where it can be shared and easily accessible. SCAN serves as a platform for both specimen data management (web-based collection database) and specimen data sharing (primary repository and data aggregator). Currently, 225 North American data providers manage and share their arthropod data on SCAN.

Tropics to Tundra Bees
This project works with bee data that has already been digitized or otherwise mobilized to model the distributions of more than 4,200 bee species from Colombia through Canada. This type of research is critical to understanding shifts in bee distributions over time and space as our planet continues to change.

BeeDC (Global Bee Occurrence Data Workflow)
This project focuses on developing a data cleaning workflow that can be used for bee datasets. As a proof of concept, it is compiling a globally synthesized and flagged bee occurrence dataset that can be used for ecological modeling or other research purposes.

US Bees Assessment
This project examined data from over 3,000 bee species in the US and analyzed the data to identify persistent gaps in the available data. This is crucial information in determining areas to focus on for both future digitization efforts as well as new data capture efforts in order to better understand species ecologies and distributions as a whole.

While our current priorities are primarily focused on completing the digitization of bee holdings in US collections for the TCN project, we are actively partnering with collections and community science efforts throughout the world to mobilize bee data. Please contact us if you would like to collaborate or otherwise get involved in a current or new project.