FACT-CIN: BEESCAPE NEXGEN: CREATING DECISION SUPPORT TOOLS TO MANAGE BEE HEALTH AND ECOSYSTEMS THROUGH TRANSDISCIPLINARY ACTION

The pollination services provided by bees are necessary to sustain resilient, healthy, and productive agricultural, urban, and natural ecosystems. Bees also serve as an accessible and charismatic point of entry for individuals from diverse communities and perspectives to understand the importance of biodiversity and natural resources in supporting agricultural systems. With widespread reports of population declines in both wild and managed bee species, there is considerable interest in developing effective strategies to manage landscapes to support bees and their ecosystem services. However, it is uniquely challenging to predict how management practices and land use patterns might influence bee populations, since bees live in centralized nests and are impacted by resources and risks at a very fine scale, but also forage very broadly across a temporally and spatially dynamic landscape. Through this Coordinated Innovate Network, we will synthesize and integrate complex data from multiple national databases and expert opinions, and make the resulting spatiotemporal data layers, code, and statistical analyses pipelines broadly available to the public, stakeholders, and scientific community. We will partner closely with stakeholders to help us define approaches for improving our quantification of the resources available to bees in a landscape, and identify strategies for visualizing and organizing these complex data sets so that the resulting platform is most useful for data exploration, decision support, and hypothesis-building. In addition to these cyberinformatic resources, we will examine how different stakeholder groups (beekeepers, growers, conservationists, and policymakers) evaluate and manage landscape quality for bees and pollination services, which can help inform future communication and education systems, as well as regional and national decision-making processes. Thus, this project is truly transdisciplinary, as it brings together diverse scientists and stakeholders in a shared process that will answer fundamental questions in how environmental conditions influence bee health; generate highly integrative data sets, pipelines, and resources; and empower diverse communities to join together to improve bee health and therefore agricultural outcomes.