decision support tools

To help beekeepers, growers, land managers and members of the public better assess the stressors that their managed and wild bee populations experience, we are developing a suite of decision support tools. Together with our collaborators Eric Lonsdorf (University of Minnesota) and Sarah Goslee (USDA ARS), we developed and are currently expanding generalizable landscape indices to map the quality of the landscape surrounding a selected site in terms of seasonal forage resource abundance, availability of nesting habitat, insecticide exposure risk, and weather conditions. Together with our collaborators Anthony Robinson and Patrick Dudas (Penn State) we are evaluating the needs of different stakeholders and how they interact with these tools in order to improve the value and usability of these systems. The Beescape tool can be viewed at beescape.org.

Figure from Sponsler et al 2019

References:

Robinson, A.C., Peeler, J.L., Prestby, T., Goslee, S.C., Anton, K., and C. M. Grozinger. “Beescape: Characterizing User Needs for Environmental Decision Support in Beekeeping” Ecological Informatics 64: 101366 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2021.101366 (2021).

Douglas, M.R., Sponsler, D.B., Lonsdorf, E.V. and C.M. Grozinger. “County-level analysis reveals a rapidly shifting landscape of insecticide hazard to honey bees (Apis mellifera) on US farmland”  Scientific Reports 10(1), 1-11. (2020)

Sponsler, D.B., Grozinger, C.M., Hitaj, C., Rundlöf, M., Botías, C, Code, A., Lonsdorf, E.V., Melathopoulos, A.P., Smith, D.J., Suryanarayanan, S., Thogmartin, W.E., Williams, N.M., Zhang, M.,  and M. R. Douglas. Pesticides and pollinators: a socioecological synthesis. Science of the Total Environment 662: 1012-1027 (2019).