COS 223-5 - CANCELLED - Making plant-pollinator data collection cheaper for restoration and monitoring

Abstract: Wildflower plantings are a key tool for wild bee conservation, and plant-bee interaction data are frequently used in seed mix design to ensure that plantings provide sufficient resources for a diversity of bees. Plant-bee interaction data are also used in monitoring programs to measure the success of bee-supporting habitat. However, collecting plant-bee interaction data can be prohibitively expensive. Therefore, a crucial question is how does the conservation value of seed mixes vary as a function of the intensity of the data collection effort underpinning their design? We leverage a plant-bee interaction data set to ask how bee richness is expected to change when informed by different scenarios of reduced data collection effort and cost. From the original, large data set, we created reduced data sets by randomly: 1) reducing the number of specimens sampled, 2) reducing the number of sites sampled, 3) reducing the number of sampling days per site, and 4) using data from a single, representative taxon (bumble bees). We ask whether seed mixes designed from these reduced data sets support comparable bee richness to the full data set, and for any reduction in cost. Reductions in the number of specimens sampled and the number of sampling days per site yield seed mixes that support comparable bee richness to the full data set. Reductions in the number of sites yielded seed mixes that support lower bee richness than the full data set. Using bumble bee interaction data only yields seed mixes that support lower bee richness than the full data set, especially when few plant species are included in the mixes. We recommend prioritizing broad spatial, temporal, and taxonomic coverage of plant-bee interaction data to guide cost-effective seed mix design. Our results also provide guidance for practitioners designing programs to monitor bee richness in restored habitat because plant-bee interaction data may be made cheaper by collecting fewer specimens per sampling event or collecting on fewer dates per site (as long as coverage of the full bee flight season is maintained across sites).