Beescape and BeeSpatial: Making multi-scale environmental indicators of bee habitat accessible across audiences

Pollinators, especially bees, provide a key ecosystem service by facilitating flowering plant reproduction and crop production. Supporting bee populations requires an understanding of land cover, foraging and nesting resources, insecticide loading and toxicity, and climate trends in the landscape. However, datasets necessary for assessing bee habitat quality are not conveniently located, interoperable, or readily accessible. Further, stakeholders have differing needs and technical capacities. We developed two complementary web applications that tailor access to bee habitat indicators for a large geographical region, the conterminous United States: 1) Beescape provides bee habitat quality indicators at user-selected locations and is designed from feedback by its main intended users: beekeepers, growers, gardeners, scientists, and conservationists. Beescape enables dynamic visualizations of landscape conditions impacting bees to support bee colony and habitat management and general awareness of the local status and relative importance of these factors. 2) BeeSpatial gives researchers and geospatial analysts additional data layer selections, functions for multi-location data extraction, and access to underlying geospatial data files to conduct subsequent analysis and processing. To meet its intended users’ needs, BeeSpatial returns reproducible data queries at large volumes for research workflows. Together, these applications extend access to an integrated set of bee habitat quality indicators across audiences, though we note limitations for each indicator that users should consider. This framework can be applied to other global regions and conservation management contexts, where key geospatial indicators are relevant for a range of stakeholders and supporting spatial data and models exist but are not broadly accessible.