[Pollinator] Pollinators in Peril report -update

Tue Mar 7 17:54:17 PST 2017

Good to see an update...but many questions remain...

My questions interspersed between the original text posted below...

Identification of Bees. We identified all
bees recorded as native to North America
and Hawaii in the Discover Life database
(www.discoverlife.org) and checked them
for taxonomic validity in the Integrated
Taxonomic Information System database
(www.itis.gov) and recent peer-reviewed
journal articles, especially those published in
ZooKeys. This resulted in a base list of
4,337 native bees to review for conservation
status.

||What is the definition of North America?  Are the Caribbean and Mexico
included?  The U.S. has only about 3600 valid names and Hawaii only 60 or
so, if I recall.

Conservation Status. We used Discover
Life occurrence data, museum records,
International Union for the Conservation of
Nature (IUCN) and NatureServe species
accounts, U.S. Department of Agriculture
Farm Service Agency Cropland Conversion
Datasets [37], U.S. Department of
Agriculture State and County Profiles [63],
U.S. Geological Survey National Synthesis
Project for Pesticide Use Maps [64], and
peer review and gray literature to determine
whether the conservation status of each
species was determinable and, if so, what
the status was.

||Need to explain this in more detail...for example how exactly were DL
records and museum records used?  Lots of tricky statistical issues here.

Each species was classified as DataSufficient
(1,437) or Data-Deficient (2,900),
indicating whether sufficient data were
available to assign a conservation status with
reasonable certainty.

||Need definitions for how these 2 categories were determined||

Data-Sufficient species were classified as
Secure or Declining based on changes in
their population size or range between 2005
and 2015, or if data were lacking from that
period, between 1985 and the last reported
occurrence year.

||Again a tricky statistical topic....what data set was used or created?
How did you account for differences in sampling effort?  ||

In keeping with IUCN
methodology, we classified species as
Secure if they declined by less than 30
percent between 2005 and 2015 and
Declining if they declined by 30 percent or
more during this period. Departing from the
IUCN, species with no data after 2005 were
classified as Secure if they declined by less
than 40 percent between 1985 and the last
reported occurrence, and Declining if they
declined by 40 percent or more. Range
change percent was calculated from
presence/absence reports at the county level
or a 30-mile radius of a latitude/longitude
point.
We classified species as Threatened if they
were categorized as Threatened (i.e.
Vulnerable, Endangered, Critically
Endangered) by the IUCN (Red List 3.1,
Second Edition), Vulnerable or worse (G3,
G2, G1, GH, GX) by NatureServe,
Vulnerable or worse (Vulnerable, Imperiled,
Critically Imperiled) by the Xerces Society,
Threatened or Endangered by the
Committee on the Status of Endangered
Wildlife in Canada, or Vulnerable or worse
(S3, S2, S1, SH, SX) by state natural
heritage programs when species were absent
from NatureServe, or Critically Endangered
or Vulnerable by Griswold et al. [65]. This
resulted in our listing 184 species as
Threatened.
We independently applied the IUCN and
NatureServe ranking criteria to all species
we judged to be Data-Sufficient but that
were absent from, or unranked by, the above
4
groups. We classified these species as
Threatened if they met either the IUCN
Threatened or the NatureServe Vulnerable
or worse criteria. This resulted in another
163 species being classified as Threatened.

|| I, think if you put the list out for review you would find that many
people would disagree that some of these species are declining or
threatened ||

Our study — which adds another 1,121
species with a known conservation status to
the previous work — reached a similar result:
52 percent of species with a determinable
status are declining and 24 percent are
threatened with extinction

||  Note that under normal circumstances half of the species in region
would be increasing and half would be decreasing ||

sam

On Tue, Mar 7, 2017 at 3:14 PM, peter jenkins <jenkinsbiopolicy at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>
>
> As this came up on Pollinators-L
> , especially from Sam Droege, please
>  post
>
> this update. Thank you,
>
> 
> 
> Peter T. Jenkins,  email: jenkinsbiopolicy at gmail.com  tel: 301.500.4383
> 
> //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
>
>
>
>
> Last week a couple people had some questions about our new report,
> Pollinators in Peril. Here is our response.
>
>    1.
>
>    Was the paper peer reviewed? No. Like most grey literature, including
>    most reports issued by non-profit advocacy groups, it was not.
>    2.
>
>    Can we provide more details on the methodology used? Yes. We’ve
>    updated the methodology section to provide that information. Please see the
>    new methods section here.
>    <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.biologicaldiversity.org_campaigns_native-5Fpollinators_pdfs_Pollinators-5Fin-5FPeril.pdf&d=DQMFAg&c=euGZstcaTDllvimEN8b7jXrwqOf-v5A_CdpgnVfiiMM&r=-gO9I8xtrycgNoikPlMx1WfgL_i4nK76aFhJT_XHle4&m=OQG1AIFHqnRzJqgiR5RQHPuh4guMiWEC-vWwh5xaBkk&s=x1BCIEzQRkhOVnYJ6DlDXKBjpxrv4gNmNol85FFdCq8&e=>
>
>    3.
>
>    Why weren’t individual accounts of each of the bee species presented?
>    Including individual narratives on 4337 bee species would be impractical in
>    such a publication. This report is the first publication of a long term
>    pollinator research and protection project. In the future we’ll provide
>    more extensive web-based data availability.
>
> Thanks for your concern about our native bees.
>
> -Lori Ann
>
>
>
> ……………………………………………….
>
> Lori Ann Burd
>
> Environmental Health Director
>
> Center *for* Biological Diversity
>
> 971-717-6405
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>

-- 
*Bees are Not Optional*

*Apes sunt et non liberum*
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