Big-Bee: Increasing the impacts of Anthophila collections through image and trait digitization

Bees are critical for pollination in both wild and human-dominated ecosystems and increasing evidence suggests they are decreasing globally. However, our understanding of factors driving these changes are hindered by both insufficient historical data on bee species’ distributions, and by knowledge of traits mediating bee species’ response to changing climate. Big-Bee, an NSF Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections project, is leveraging millions of bee specimens in natural history collections across 13 US institutions to create over one million high-resolution 2D and 3D images of bees, from over 5,000 species, through collaborative community research. Moreover, Big-Bee is developing tools to measure bee traits from images and is generating comprehensive bee trait and image datasets, all publicly available through an open data portal, the Bee Library. These data and trait databases are critical to filling in key gaps in our understanding of bee species’ distributions and natural history and will create much needed tools for ecologists exploring distributional changes of bees in response to climate, ultimately helping elucidate the mechanisms driving both susceptibility and resilience to climate change.