[Pollinator] A U.S. National Native Bee Monitoring Scheme

[Sam Droege]

....just put out on the Beemonitoring listserv, but of relevance hear 
since as there are some policy folks not present on the bee monitoring 
listserv...so apologies for cross-posting.

All: 

Gretchen LeBuhn, Ed Connor, and myself have been working this past year on 
a survey design for North American Native Bees along with quite a number 
of others (many thanks for all the data sharing).  We have submitted a 
paper to Science and managed to be part of the 97% of the papers submitted 
to Science that are rejected and so will submit down the food chain until, 
perhaps, we have to self-publish.  In the meantime we have made a 
presentation at the 2009 North American Pollinator Protection Campaign 
meeting unveiling our strategy to wider scrutiny.   

You can see that talk at: 

http://www.slideshare.net/sdroege/survey-design-for-monitoring-north-american-native-bees 


Not a lot of detail is presented as we didn't want to scare people with 
statistics, but if you like such things we would be happy to email you a 
draft.  You can reach me at sdroege at usgs.gov to do so. 

We are now moving towards the negotiations table to start putting together 
some funding. 

Below are some of the essential elements. 

1.  A statistically reasonable program can be put together that will 
capture 1-2% per year changes in bee populations over a 5 year window 
using 100 sampling sites. 
2.  The sampling frame for those 100 sites is open to all sorts of 
possibilities, but the answer (unless you want to define the goals, 
definitions, and parameters differently) will always be 100. 
3.  So, for example, we have proposed that the federal groups that manage 
large amounts of public lands (USFS, USFWS, NPS, DOD, BLM, BuRec) all 
could assess how their properties are doing using 100 surveys sites.  So, 
too could a state or the USDA could sample all orchards across the U.S. 
...and so forth. 
4. A survey location is simply a transect of 24 or 30 bowls (we haven't 
decided, the Canadians are using 30, so we may go that way for 
comparability) of 3 colors, spaced 50m apart and run on an appropriate day 
every 2 weeks throughout the season.  Each site would be run only 1 time 
every 5 years and the starting year for sites would be spaced across four 
years. 
5.  Specimens will be bagged and shipped to 2 proposed processing centers. 

6.  Costs per site will be low and overall costs will largely be that of 
supporting a coordinator and technicians to process specimens.  As an 
example we estimated if 4 programs were created for 4 different management 
or agricultural groups, using 200 sites each (we used 200 rather than 100 
so we would have a better initial estimation of change), they would 
generate 170,000 specimens a year and in addition to the coordinator it 
would take 2 additional people (FTE's) to process that amount.  (see 
http://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/BBS/ for an example of a program, run by 
volunteers, that drives much of the large scale conservation of birds). 
7.  The beauty of this system, and any monitoring program, really; is that 
it increases in statistical power with time.  As the system continues it 
become possible to track trends of many of the individual species, look at 
regional patterns, split things by guilds, genera, etc. 
8. Because everything is standardized all sorts of biogeographical and 
ecological analyses are possible. 

Well, it looks like I will remain busy with all this for a few more 
years....... 

sam 

                                               
Sam Droege  sdroege at usgs.gov                      
w 301-497-5840 h 301-390-7759 fax 301-497-5624
USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center
BARC-EAST, BLDG 308, RM 124 10300 Balt. Ave., Beltsville, MD  20705
Http://www.pwrc.usgs.gov 

"They've got this steamroller going, and they won't stop until there's 
nobody fishing. What are they going to do then, save some bees?"
Mike Russo

(Massachusetts fisherman who has fished cod for 18 years, on 
environmentalist) 
P Bees are not optional.
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