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The tool provides indices of bee resources and risks across the U.S. based on crops being grown.

April 23, 2021

3 Min Read
bee resting on flower
CONSERVING BEES: The Beescape tool developed by Penn State will be upgraded to better guide beekeepers, growers, conservationists and policymakers in evaluating resources and risks at their locations.jamesvancouver/Getty Images

A Penn State-led research team has received a nearly $950,000 USDA grant to create the next generation of an online decision-support tool designed to help conserve pollinator populations across the U.S.

The USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture awarded the funding under its Food and Agriculture Cyberinformatics and Tools grant program, which supports projects aimed at enabling research and stakeholder communities to leverage data and technologies to improve management of U.S. food and agricultural systems, and natural resources.

"Bees provide critical pollination services in urban, agricultural and natural landscapes," says project director Christina Grozinger, the Publius Vergilius Maro professor of entomology in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences.

"But bee populations are threatened by shifting land-use patterns and climate changes that disrupt nesting habitat, reduce flowering plants for forage and increase the risk of insecticide exposure. With widespread reports of population declines in both wild and managed bee species, there is tremendous interest in developing effective strategies to manage landscapes to support bees and the ecosystem services they provide."

Grozinger, who directs Penn State's Center for Pollinator Research, noted that since bees forage across large distances but live in centralized nests, they are affected by resources and risks at both broad and very fine landscape scales. This poses significant challenges in predicting how wild or managed bee populations will perform at a selected location.

To assist in this effort, Grozinger's research group used previous funding from USDA, and the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research, to develop Beescape, an online decision-support tool that integrates multiple national databases to provide indices of bee resources — forage and nesting habitat — and risks — insecticide toxic load — across the continental U.S.

beescape.org

The grant will allow the team to significantly expand Beescape's functionality to better guide beekeepers, growers, conservationists and policymakers in evaluating resources and risks at their locations.

To be called Beescape NexGen, the system will feature a tool to assess the economic value of pollination services for all crops dependent on insect pollination in a given area. It also will include a refined seasonal forage quality index that integrates stakeholder perspectives and additional national datasets.

The application also will offer bee support assessments at local and regional spatial scales, and the ability to explore changes across multiple years.

The researchers will hold workshops and create interactive, web-based visualization tools that will help users evaluate the resources and risks to bees at local and landscape scales, with an eye toward guiding them to make more informed decisions about managing their bee populations and landscapes.

"This project will be based on and foster community-driven science, ensuring that our research is both immediately applicable and is laying the groundwork for years of future collaborations," Grozinger says.  

Source: Penn State University, which is solely responsible for the information provided and is wholly owned by the source. Informa Business Media and all its subsidiaries are not responsible for any of the content contained in this information asset.

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