Pollinators are essential to food production as about 75% of our world's food crops depend at least in part on pollination. Yet as the European Red List of Bees and other sources highlight, more than 50% of the European bee species are currently data deficient, and as a consequence, a Red List status (e.g. threatened, endangered, vulnerable) cannot be assigned. This means that there are probably many more bee species threatened in Europe on top of the 9% that were assessed as such so far.
However, bees in particular are hard to identify. This leads to underrepresentation on resources such as Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), a Global Core Biodata Resource (GCBR). GBIF aggregates metadata on many if not all known species from various crowd sourcing initiatives. On one of these platforms, iNaturalist.org, 58% of the European bee species have already been recorded, making citizen scientists an important source for observational data on pollinator species. Through better and more accessible species identification tools, the quantity and quality of these observations could be significantly improved. Books written by experts are available for some regions, and there are also physical reference collections in some museums. Additionally, a lot of the information on pollinators is scattered over the internet.
During this hackathon, we aim to develop a virtual reference collection that can act as a central hub of taxonomic data needed for feature detection, enabling large communities of naturalists to recognize and, by doing so, help identifying the state of our pollinators.
By the end of the hackathon, we want to present a demo of an accessible and useful virtual reference collection. This mock-up will then feed into the TETTRIs project that aims to build a virtual pollinator reference collection for all European pollinators.
Our main focus will be on the types of data that are needed for insect identification mentioned above. We will focus on finding and storing links between different open databases (e.g. GBIF, BOLD, ENA, GloBI) into a Wikibase for, for example, bees. These links will then be leveraged into new or improved Wikipedia articles that could help citizen scientists with their identifications.
For the project to succeed, we need a diverse team of around 7 people who will contribute at a range of different levels from writing scripts to extracting verified specimens from global infrastructures to validating outputs, assembling species profiles, verifying taxonomy and linking additional information.
- Sofie Meeus, Meise Botanic Garden, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0715-8647, online
- Andra Waagmeester, , , online
- Jere Kahanpää, Finnish Museum of Natural History, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1485-5272, on-site
- Laura Abraham, Meise Botanic Garden, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4070-2982, on-site
- William Morris, Finnish Museum of Natural History, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8686-4154, online
- Shaping and extending the linked open data model for virtual reference collections
- Investigating the coverage of bumblebee species by wikipedia and creating wikipedia pages (or stubs) using a workflow that allows for incorporation of researchgrade species pictures with the correct license from iNaturalist into Wikipedia.
- Mobilization of ecological data to specialized (open!) repositories including interaction data (plant-pollinator/parasitic) to GloBI