March 2024 to March 2026

Laura Melissa Guzman¹, Maria Argenis Bonilla Gomez², Diego Alexander Guevara Farias², Juan Diego Maldonado Cepeda², and Neil Cobb³

 ¹University of Southern California, guzmanur@usc.edu ²Universidad Nacional de Colombia mabonillag@unal.edu.co, daguevaraf@unal.edu.co, madguevaragu@unal.edu.co ³Biodiversity Outreach Network neilscobb@gmail.com

                                                                                            The Biodiversity Challenge:

More than 75 % of global food crops rely on animal pollination [1]. Bees are by far the most important pollinators and 20,000+ bee species provide essential services for both global food production and healthy functioning ecosystems. While extensive research has shown that bees may be declining due to multiple threats (e.g., land use change, pesticides, climate change), we do not even know the geographic distributions for most bee species much less whether their populations are declining. Thus, no baseline exists to measure presumed environmental impacts on bee populations and distributions. We cannot conserve species if we do not know where they exist.

This “Biodiversity Knowledge” challenge is particularly acute in Colombia and more generally throughout the tropics. Native bees are critical for maintaining native plant biodiversity through their pollination. Additionally, the tropics are unique in having native social bee species make honey that is healthier for people than honey made from the introduced “Honey Bee”. The practice of breeding and gathering honey from native stingless bees is an important economic and cultural practice (melipoliculture). Melipoliculture is promoted in Colombia as a path of economic independence and the reduction of deforestation of the Amazon, as well as a strategy to involve local communities in sustainable practices [2,3]. The Colombian-based Humboldt Institute highlighted the biggest gap is the lack of knowledge on species checklists and distribution data [4]. They underscored an issue that has been formalized as the “Wallacean Shortfall” (species and assemblage distributions), and it is a fundamental challenge for biodiversity research to understand and conserve biodiversity [5]. A critical type of data we need to understand how bee distributions vary spatially and taxonomically are historical museum specimen records. However, most of this data is locked in physical specimen labels. Mobilizing this distributional data is increasingly becoming available in North America, yet for South America data is still severely lagging.

Goals:

We have two fundamental goals that focus on increasing our knowledge on native bee distributions (research) and integrating this biodiversity data into education-outreach efforts (conservation). Our research goal is to create species distributional maps for up to 1,000 bee species found in Colombia. Knowing species distributions means that we can factor pollination services into assessments, manage areas that may show diversity losses, and provide a baseline against which to assess declines. Most of the data for mapping will come from tens of thousands of existing records. However, a major thrust will be to both digitize new specimens from Colombian collections and establish long-term digitization programs for each collection. The conservation goal is to ensure this information is provided to Colombian researchers and conservation programs. In turn we hope to promote So far, we have made a concerted effort to identify all of the species that occur in Colombia, and developing distributional maps for these species is crucial to effective conservation of stingless bees.

Objectives
1. Mobilizing Colombian Biodiversity Data: We have initiated an informal Colombian Bee Network targeting 29 institutional insect collections throughout Colombia. Trained students and collection staff will transcribe label data from 80,000 of pinned adult specimens across 16 research collections, and expect to establish digitization programs for an additional 13 research collections.

2. Building biodiversity databases: We have established iDigBees.org as a global program to address the Wallacean challenge. We will build on the previously developed species distributions of bees from other iDigBees projects. We will refine initial distribution models for 663 species produced by the Tropics to Tundra project and work towards obtaining enough data for 400 more species. The protocol developed for the Colombia iDigBees project will provide a framework for developing similar work in other tropical regions.

3. Gaps in bee biodiversity data for Colombia: As a group (iDigBees.org), we have published the largest dataset of bee occurrences in the contiguous United States focusing on the data gaps for be occurrences [6]. We are doing an even more complete analysis of bee biodiversityexamining bee biodiversity patterns from Colombia to Canada (i.e. Tropics to Tundra . This will allow us to identify areas where we lack information of bee diversity. We will evaluate biodiversity completeness of bees for any region in Colombia and will foster future inventories by highlighting key gaps. Most importantly, these predictive species assemblages will be key to identify suitable habitat in different regions for bee conservation. This will be straightforward for stingless bees because Indigenous communities already know how to raise and breed stingless bees for honey and medicine production.

4. Inform-collaborate with research-conservation efforts – Collaboration: Land management agencies and conservation programs can be informed about the bee species and their distributions in Colombia. This could involve sharing the database with them and providing information on the ecological roles of bees, threats to their populations, and potential conservation strategies. Conservation programs provide feedback on the information provided and collaborate with iDigBees Colombia to fill knowledge gaps. For example, they may ask for more specific information on certain species or request that scientists conduct surveys in certain areas.

Novelty and innovation of the proposed research: Our research is innovative because these type of distributional maps for bees have not been done in South America and are just starting to be done in North America. There are only a few other efforts to develop country to global biodiversity data sets for insects [7]. Further, while stingless bees are a part of the diversity of bees in Colombia, this project lays the foundations to advance the distributional knowledge of both stingless bees and non-social native bees. We will work with communities to expand the usage of community science and work closely with local communities.

Impact of the proposed research: Our proposed research will produce up to date distributional maps for bees in Colombia, which can be used for further spatial conservational planning. Particularly, identifying where stingless bees are found in Colombia will be crucial for the future sustenance of melipoliculture. Colombia iDigBees will make data accessible that can help mitigate the adverse effects of climate change, will help build scientific and technical capacity in groups typically underrepresented, and will promote international relationships between Colombia, the US, Canada, and Mexico.

References:

[1] IPBES (2016). The assessment report of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services on pollinators, pollination and food production. S.G. Potts, V. L. Imperatriz- Fonseca, and H. T. Ngo (eds). Secretariat of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, Bonn, Germany. 552 pages. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3402856

[2] Amazon Conservation Team, The Nature Conservancy. Guía práctica para la Implementación de la meliponicultura en el noroccidente amazónico. 2020. Colombia

[3] Nates-Parra, G. & Ramirez, B.H., Cartilla Cría y Manejo de Abejas sin Aguijón, LABUN 2022

[4] Londoño-Carvajal, C.A., Cuéllar Nuñez, J.F., Cely Santos, S.M., Nates Parra, G., Medina, C.A., 2020, Ficha 206: Abejas sin Abejas sin aguijón en Colombia: Estado de la meliponicultura en Colombia. Humboldt report

[5] Hortal, Joaquín, Francesco de Bello, José Alexandre F. Diniz-Filho, Thomas M. Lewinsohn, Jorge M. Lobo, and Richard J. Ladle. “Seven shortfalls that beset large-scale knowledge of biodiversity.” Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 46 (2015): 523-549.

[6] Chesshire, P.R., Fischer, E.E., Dowdy, N.J., Griswold, T.L., Hughes, A.C., Orr, M.C., Ascher, J.S., Guzman, L.M., Hung, K.L.J., Cobb, N.S. and McCabe, L.M., 2023. Completeness analysis for over 3000 United States bee species identifies persistent data gap. Ecography, p.e06584.

[7] Kass, J. M., Guénard, B., Dudley, K. L., Jenkins, C. N., Azuma, F., Fisher, B. L., … & Economo, E. P. (2022). The global distribution of known and undiscovered ant biodiversity. Science advances, 8(31), eabp9908.

[8] Dorey, J. B., Paige C.R., Bolaños A. N., O’Reilly, R. L., Bossert, S., Collins, S., Lichtenberg E.M., Tucker, E. M., Smith-Pardo, A., Falcon-Brindis, A., Guevara, D.A., Ribeiro, B., de Pedro, D., Fischer, E.E., Hung, K.L.J., Parys, K.A., McCabe, L.M. , Rogan M.S., Minckley, R.L., Velzco, S.J.E, Griswold, T., Zarrillo, T.A., Jetz, W., Sica, Y.V., Orr, M.C.*, Guzman, L. M.*, Ascher, J.A.*, Hughes, A.C.*, Cobb, N.S.* (Scientific Data – SDATA-22-01582) A globally synthesised and flagged bee occurrence dataset and cleaning workflow. *Authors jointly supervised this work

[9] Guzman, L. M., Johnson, S. A., Mooers, A. O., & M’Gonigle, L. K. (2021). Using historical data to estimate bumble bee occurrence: Variable trends across species provide little support for community-level declines. Biological Conservation, 257, 109141.

[10] Shirey, V., Khelifa, R., M’Gonigle, L. K., & Guzman, L. M. Occupancy‐detection models with museum specimen data: promise and pitfalls. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 14(2) 402- 414

[11] Jackson, H. M., Johnson, S. A., Morandin, L. A., Richardson, L. L., Guzman, L. M., & M’Gonigle, L. K. (2022). Climate change winners and losers among North American bumblebees. Biology Letters, 18(6), 20210551