TCN: Extending Anthophila research through image and trait digitization (Big-Bee)

Extending Anthophila research through image and trait digitization (Big-Bee)

BigBee TCN
Quick Links
Project Summary
Current Research
Project Websites
Publications

Project Summary

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 sustain 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 Thematic Collection Network (Big-Bee TCN) 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 award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Project Websites & Social Media

http://big-bee.net/

Project Leadership

Project sponsor: University of California-Santa Barbara

Principal Investigator (PI): Katja Seltmann (Principal Investigator) Seltmann, Katja (NSF Award #2102006)

Project Collaborators

University of Nevada - Reno

Allen, Julie (NSF Award #2102006)

Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services · Entomology, Nematology and Plant Pathology

Talamas, Elijah (NSF Award #2102006)

Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Brown, Brian (NSF Award #2102006)

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

TBA (NSF Award #2101345)

University of Colorado at Boulder

Carper, Adrian L. (NSF Award #2101850)

University of Kansas Center for Research Inc

Gonzalez, Victor H. (NSF Award #2101851)

California Academy of Sciences

Grinter, Chris (NSF Award #2101875)

San Diego Society of Natural History

Horsley, Pamela (NSF Award #2101876)

University of New Hampshire

Miko, Istvan (NSF Award #2101891)

Harvard University

Pierce, Naomi E. (NSF Award #2101908)

Arizona State University

Franz, Nico M. (NSF Award #2101913)

University of California-Berkeley

Tsutsui, Neil D. (NSF Award #2101929)

Publications

The full proposal can be found at: Seltmann, K. C. (2021). Extending Anthophila research through image and trait digitization (Big-Bee) proposal. UC Santa Barbara: Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2vm761mv

Seltmann KC, Allen J, Brown BV, Carper A, Engel MS, Franz N, Gilbert E, Grinter C, Gonzalez VH, Horsley P, Lee S, Maier C, Miko I, Morris P, Oboyski P, Pierce NE, Poelen J, Scott VL, Smith M, Talamas EJ, Tsutsui ND, Tucker E (2021) Announcing Big-Bee: An initiative to promote understanding of bees through image and trait digitization. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 5: e74037. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.5.74037

Other project documentation

Seltmann, K., Allen, J., Brown, B. V, Carper, A., Engel, M. S, Franz, N., et al. (2021). Announcing Big-Bee: An initiative to promote understanding of bees through image and trait digitization. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards, 5(e74037). Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0937b5gp. Poster from TDWG 2021 Conference.

Gonzalez, VH., Seltmann, KC., Brown, B., Allen, J., Carper, A., Engel, M., et al. (2021). Big-Bee: Una iniciativa para promover el conocimiento de las abejas a través de la digitalización de imágenes y datos de rasgos. ID 112. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0856h3d2. Poster from XII Congreso Mesoamericano de Abejas Nativas, Centro de Investigaciones Apícolas Tropicales (CINAT), Universidad Nacional, Costa Rica, Nov. 20-21, 2021.

Shelly Leachman (2021). Creating a Buzz. UCSB Current. Retrieved from [1] on 27 Oct 2021.

Tara Duggan. (2021). To help fight loss of bees, California Academy of Sciences to share 180,000-strong collection online. San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved from https://www.sfchronicle.com/climate/article/To-help-fight-loss-of-bees-California-Academy-of-16570034.php on 2 Nov 2021.