ABOVE: A Patagonian bumble bee (Bombus dahlbomii)
E. E. ZATTARA
Between 2006 and 2015, about 25 percent fewer bee species appeared in museum and naturalists' observation records compared with the period between 1946 and 1995, according to a study published today (January 22) in One Earth. The results corroborate other recent reports that the fuzzy pollinators are in peril.
To measure insect declines, many studies sample the same location repeatedly over time. “That’s the ideal data,” says Eduardo Zattara, an adjunct researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) in Argentina and a coauthor of the study. But because these data only exist for specific locations and bee groups, examining global bee trends requires a different approach. Zattara and his colleague Marcelo Aizen, a senior scientist at CONICET, used data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, a database that collates millions of records from museum specimens, private collections, and ...
