Global bee interaction database

Information about bee floral specialization and other species interactions are found in scientific papers, on natural history specimen labels, and made available through community science platforms (i.e., iNaturalist). Species interaction information is time-intensive to collect and difficult to combine into one dataset because we lack a uniform method for data sharing.

The Global Bee Interaction Dataset consists of bee interactions indexed by Global Biotic Interactions (GloBI - https://www.globalbioticinteractions.org), an online infrastructure for sharing and combining species interaction datasets. Versions of the dataset are published via Zenodo by the Big Bee Project (http://big-bee.net) to summarize available knowledge about bee interactions in an open and accessible manner. In addition, taxonomic names in the data are aligned with curated taxonomic resources, and other quality control checks are applied to the dataset. Interactions include visitation, parasitism (mite, viral), and lecty. The dataset has 362,981 unique bee observations from about 100 sources (evaluated May 19, 2022). Half of the interactions are found in the Apidae, while the fewest are in the Stenotritidae.

The Global Bee Interaction Dataset also provides an example of collaboratively creating a large, open, reusable trait dataset about insects using readily available online tools. It includes dataset versioning, record identifiers, links to definitions for ecological relationships, and identifiers for taxon names. In conclusion, we demonstrate a combination of methods for publishing interaction and trait data to improve the reusability of research and provide authors with a means of sharing trait data for biodiversity research.