![]() The main role of project volunteers is to spend the effort it takes to get to remote or unsurveyed locations and take the photos that experts need to curate a high-quality data set. “The challenge is that bumblebees are so variable that identifying them is hard.”įortunately, volunteers don’t need to be experts in bumblebee identification, or even be able to identify bumblebee species at all – that is the job of the project leaders who carefully verify every photo taken by volunteers. “You can’t do this work very well, very productively, unless you go through the training and start learning what you’re looking at,” Schafer says. However, the atlas’ training on what to look for, how to identify bees and how to collect data is required for participation. While Schafer has the advantage of being a professional photographer, he says that previous skill in bee identification and photography is not necessary. “I just wish (bees) were around all year. I’ve dedicated my summers for the last five years doing this,” he says. “I thought, ‘Well, that’d be fun.’ It was an excuse to go into the backcountry and chase bees around. Now retired, Schafer has volunteered for the atlas since its inception. The wildlife photographer has traveled the world documenting endangered species and natural history for publications including National Geographic. Kevin Schafer is among the scores of volunteers who have adopted and surveyed grids over the years. Professional biologists alone could not collect that volume of data,” he says. “The amazing part of this project of course, is it couldn’t succeed without all those amazing volunteers. Taylor Cotten is the Conservation Assessment Section Manager at Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and one of the project leads. Fish and Wildlife Service awarded the partnership a Competitive State Wildlife Grant to launch the Pacific Northwest Bumble Bee Atlas. ![]() ![]() They developed a training program for volunteers, created a system for submitting data and photos and put the focus on the Species of Greatest Conservation Need. We got thousands of responses and a fair number of positive hits.”īut he discovered over the next few years that the program needed a lot of tweaking to get the kind of data he was hoping for.īy 2017, the Xerces Society had partnered with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and partners in Oregon to develop a grid-style system that divided the three states into manageable grids for citizen scientists to adopt. “We learned that people were enthusiastic to contribute and it didn’t take a whole lot of effort to get people engaged. “We distributed them all over the country and set up an email account to gather photos,” Hatfield recalls. He got a sense the public was eager to help from an early program Xerces developed using wanted posters for three rare species. There simply weren’t enough scientists to scour the countryside for bumblebees in the timeframe needed to make a difference. Hatfield wanted to find a way to enlist the public’s help in gathering the data to make more informed decisions and learn how to help species recover. The analyses he led for the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Bumble Bee Specialist Group, corroborated those studies, indicating that more than one-quarter of the approximately 50 bumblebee species in North America were facing some degree of extinction risk. ![]() Hatfield, now senior conservation biologist for the nonprofit’s endangered species program, remembers thinking, “How could we do a better job gathering data for the purposes of conservation decision making?”īefore Hatfield’s tenure at Xerces, a number of studies indicated that several species of bumblebees were experiencing significant population declines. He realized a pile of data on bumblebees he’d been handed to assess the extinction risk of North America’s bumblebees forced him to make inferences that made him uncomfortable. Rich Hatfield, who has studied bees all his adult life, says the idea for the atlas was born about 10 years ago when he began working at the nonprofit Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, in Portland, Oregon. The atlas is a terrific example of how partnerships between government, nongovernmental organizations, private landowners and volunteers have contributed to preventing the extinction of so many animals and plants over the course of the Endangered Species Act’s first 50 years. Over the last five years, the Bumble Bee Atlas project has grown from an idea on how to get volunteers involved in collecting data on native bumblebees in the Pacific Northwest to a nationwide quest to learn as much as we can about these vital pollinators.
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