A Specimen-Level Database of the North American and Mexican Wild Bees (Apoidea) at the University of Kansas

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ABSTRACT0096905A specimen-level database of the North American and Mexican wild bees at the University of KansasNew computational and information technology provides innovative opportunities to use data resident in museum collections to address research projects involving conservation, predictive modeling, visualization of distributions, as well as other biological phenomena. Unfortunately, few databases for insects or other invertebrates exist for use with these new tools. The wild bees (superfamily Apoidea), with over 20,000 described species world-wide, play a profound role in the economy of nature; as pollinators, they are critically important in structuring ecosystems and have a major impact on agriculture. Data in the excellent bee collection at the University of Kansas will be entered in a modern relational database in order to bring them into a currency for research in biological informatics. This project will 1) capture specimen data from 35,400 specimens of Mexican and 120,000 specimens of North American Apoidea (bees) (7 families; 2272 North American and 838 Mexican species) from the collection of the Division of Entomology of the KU Natural History Museum/Biodiversity Research Center in a fully relational database; 2) provide georeferencing (latitude and longitude) for locality information so that the data are maximally useful to the greatest diversity of users; and 3) make this database available in fully searchable form on the World Wide Web using Z39.50 query and retrieval protocol.This will be the first comprehensive database of specimen data for Mexican and North American Apoidea (bees) and will include nearly 200,000 individual specimen records, representing data for over 3,100 species, when combined with existing data for Mexican bees. Once the data for these bees are captured, verified and accurately georeferenced, they become permanently accessible to the user community. The database will be web accessible using Z39.50 protocols for search and data retrieval. Retrieved data will be interoperable with other bee databases that may be developed or placed on-line, and with geospatial, modeling and other analytical tools (such as "Species Analyst," Biodiversity Workshop, and Arcview) for research in systematics, ecology, and biodiversity dynamics. Programs for mapping, visualization and modeling of biodiversity data are constantly improving, thereby increasing the value of the bee database. By bringing this material into a database, particularly with georeferenced locality data, it will be possible to associate distributional patterns with those of other plant and animal groups for broader biogeographical studies incorporating G.I.S. information on temperature clines, soil types, and other physical data. The data will be available for use in policy decisions concerning native pollinators, agriculture, biological diversity, biogeography, conservation, and resource management as well as basic and comparative research programs.