The State of Bee Monitoring in the United States: A Call to Refocus Away From Bowl Traps and Towards More Effective Methods
By Zachary M. Portman, Bethanne Bruninga‐Socolar, Daniel P. Cariveau. Annals of the Entomological Society of America, 2020
149 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Effective monitoring is necessary to provide robust detection of bee declines. In the United States and worldwide, bowl traps have been increasingly used to monitor native bees and purportedly detect declines. However, bowl traps have a suite of flaws that make them poorly equipped to monitor bees. We outline the drawbacks of bowl traps, as well as other passive sampling methods. We emphasize that current methods do not monitor changes in bee abundance. We then propose future approaches to improve bee monitoring efforts, which include improving our understanding of the efficacy and drawbacks of current methods, novel molecular methods, nest censusing, mark-recapture, sampling of focal plant taxa, and detection of range contractions. Overall, we hope to highlight deficiencies of the current state of bee monitoring, with an aim to stimulate research into the efficacy of existing methods and promote novel methods that provide meaningful data that can detect declines without squandering limited resources.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics, Insect Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ef6aafbeb7c96637bc34a1103e43162fb56e80c7
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
- Rachel Fordyce
- Katherine R. Urban‐Mead
- Maria T. van Dyke
- A. Espinoza
- S. McArt
- B. Danforth
- J. Gillung
- Paige A. Muñiz
In Genetics
- Rachel Fordyce
- Katherine R. Urban‐Mead
- Maria T. van Dyke
- A. Espinoza
- S. McArt
- B. Danforth
- J. Gillung
- Paige A. Muñiz
In Insect Science
Citations in the corpus
- Bees in the trees: Diverse spring fauna in temperate forest edge canopies (2021, background): “To better understand the bee community despite these limitations (Portman et al. 2020), we also attempted multiple days of canopy netting on open flowers, and observed phenomena worthy of future exploration.”