IDmyBee is designed as a collaborative project of bee taxonomists and specialists to promote the diffusion of knowledge about wild bee diversity and to promote research to improve this knowledge.
With more than 2 000 species of wild bees in Europe, identifying a bee can quickly become an overwhelming task, especially in the current context where it is difficult to find resources to identify the species for most parts of Europe.
With more than 2 000 species of wild bees in Europe, identifying a bee can quickly become an overwhelming task, especially in the current context where it is difficult to find resources to identify the species for most parts of Europe.
Goals of the project
- To improve the availability of existing data about the taxonomy and identification of European wild bee species.
- To facilitate accurate species identification using new tools.
- To promote research on taxonomy and systematics of European wild bees, which is necessary to develop these tools.
How?
- By completing a website to centralize the knowledge on European wild bee diversity with:
- List of species names
- Estimated difficulty of identification
- Illustration of morphological criteria required for identification
- Checklist of the literature related to the taxon (genus, species)
- Location and pictures of the type specimens.
- Original descriptions and formalized morphological description.
- By developing 'taxonomic packages': online identification tools based on an interactive identification platform: Xper3 (more info here). These packages will be freely available online, from the website, and regularly updated. In exchange, we ask users to cite each package (mentioning their version) in any publication or presentation based on their identifications. This way, their identifications are explicit, which improves the repeatability of their work. And the people who developed the packages get some recognition that can help them secure further funding to maintain and improve the packages.
For who?
Anyone interested in wild bee diversity.
This website and its tools are designed for non-specialists, but we hope that the project will benefit specialists too:
This website and its tools are designed for non-specialists, but we hope that the project will benefit specialists too:
- The centralization of this mass of knowledge could help specialists and future specialists to boost their research.
- The use of IDmyBee tools under condition of citation could help tackle the current lack of recognition of taxonomic research in academia.
- The exposure of gaps in our knowledge of wild bee diversity could support applications for funding to boost the research in bee taxonomy and to hire qualified staff (entomologists, photographs, collection curators).
By whom?
This project is managed by researchers on a voluntary basis.
The problem is that researchers are very busy (buzzy?), while the synthesis of the bee taxonomic knowledge and the development of identification tools will require hundreds of hours of work. Bibliographic work, natural history collection visits, specimen observations, macrophotographies and drawings take time.
So volunteers are welcome to join the team since some things could be done by non-specialists to help bee taxonomy (see here). To develop IDmyBee more quickly, we hope to raise funding for specific projects (each focused on a genus, or a species-group). Such projects, if funded, would mostly help us to hire people, but unfortunately we are not there yet.
The problem is that researchers are very busy (buzzy?), while the synthesis of the bee taxonomic knowledge and the development of identification tools will require hundreds of hours of work. Bibliographic work, natural history collection visits, specimen observations, macrophotographies and drawings take time.
So volunteers are welcome to join the team since some things could be done by non-specialists to help bee taxonomy (see here). To develop IDmyBee more quickly, we hope to raise funding for specific projects (each focused on a genus, or a species-group). Such projects, if funded, would mostly help us to hire people, but unfortunately we are not there yet.