Funding to Create Bee Database
Douglas Yanega, senior museum scientist at the Entomology Research Museum, has received a $50,000 grant to create a database of UCR's bee collection. Awarded by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), an international organization "working to make the world's biodiversity data accessible anywhere in the world," the 16-month grant will allow Yanega to assign a uniquely numbered label to each specimen in the collection. Each number will be entered into a database along with information on where and when each specimen was collected, its identity, and, if available, the identity of the plant it was collected on. The information will later be made available online through GBIF's data portal for studies of pollination ecology, conservation ecology, phenology and biogeography. "Part of the project is to find out how many species we actually have. Many of them are almost certainly extinct," Yanega said. UCR's bee collection dates back to the days when UCR was founded as the Citrus Experiment Station at the turn of the previous century, and contains an estimated 150,000 specimens identified at least to genus, making it one of the largest bee collections in the Northern Hemisphere.