Cody Feuerborn
MSc Student, Biology, co-advised with Professor Heather Hines
EDUCATION
BSc. Integrative Biosciences, Oregon State University (2021)
RESEARCH INTERESTS
I am currently working on a project to determine the geographical distributions and phenology of bumble bee species in Pennsylvania. I am using field data collected in Pennsylvania over the last several years supplemented with historic records and online datasets in order to uncover these trends. I am also looking at how landscape and climatic variables determine the major factors limiting bumble bee life history traits and distributions.
I am also interested in assessing the role of thermal tolerance in local bumble bee distributions. I have been testing the relationship between resilience to heat stress and climatic niche among species. I am also investigating the role of habitat type, nutrition, and sex/caste in heat tolerance to understand how heat resilience can be improved by management strategies.
While completing my undergrad at Oregon State University I managed a database of 80,000 native bee and host plant records for The Oregon Bee Atlas, a citizen science-driven initiative to characterize the bee fauna of Oregon. Using volunteer collection data, I developed species distribution maps (including bumble bees) to help tell the story of Oregon’s wild bees. I also developed volunteer sampling distribution maps as well as an online map tool for volunteers to locate common host-plants visited by native bees in order to increase collection efforts..