Our project is about seeing how pollinator diversity (species richness) and distribution changes across a variety of geographical, environmental (which includes climactic and human land-use factors), and biological gradients. Our goal is to better describe pollinator ecology outside of simply Apis mellifera and in turn, increase understanding of potentially sensitive and important pollinators that are often overlooked. We hope this information will be used towards bettering conservation efforts and inform policies for issues such as land management and environmental regulations to encourage
Our dataset was obtained from the Pollinator Library found on the US Geological Survey website. It is a survey dataset on pollinator occurrence, their associated plants, and climactic factors across the US in Colorado, North Dakota, and Texas (most data is in North Dakota and Texas). The dataset has 23 columns that include, most importantly, taxonomic information of pollinators (across Holometabolan orders) and associated plants (with concentrations in Asteraceae and Fabaceae). Within Hymenoptera, the most common families are Apidae and Halictidiae (bee families!). It also includes GPS coordinates and other location/date/time data, as well as land-use data, elevation, average wind speed, relative air humidity, and air temperature measurements. These will be the variables we use to answer our questions on how certain hymenopteran genera vary across space and environmental conditions (climate, land-use, plant availability).
The data was collected by many collaborating researchers across 3 states, each collecting voucher specimens, identifying the associated plant, and making location and climactic measurements (like land-use, wind speed, air temperature, etc). Link to more information, including the standardized worksheet on how each collaborator collected their specimens: https://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/pollinator/about.
Reference: Data from: United States Geological Survey, Pollinator Library. https://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/pollinator/Downloads. Accessed 11/07/2019.
All of us are responsible for some degree of analysis in our project.
Natasha: Good at spatial stats, making plots. She will be answering our spatial distribution question regarding how pollinators are distributed across different locations, along with their relative occurrencces with city centers. Madison: Good at developing presentation and visualization of data. She will be answering the land-use question on how pollinator diversity and occurrence frequency changes with different land management practices - wildlife reserves vs agricultural land, and across localities. Sophia: Has experience with Hymenopteran research and background literature. She will be answering the questions regarding how pollinator diversity changes across climactic gradients, and whether these effects are the same for different genera/families. These factors also influence each other, so she will also investigate into whether they are correlated with each other.
At each meeting, our roles (leader, recorder, and organizer) will rotate. At our first meeting, Sophia was recorder, Madison was organizer, and Natasha was leader. At our next meeting, Natasha will be recorder, Madison will be leader, and Sophia will be organizer, and so on.