Birds, Bees, and Big Data: Rethinking Conservation (Ep. 58)

Wild bee populations are in steep decline, yet researchers and conservationists face a critical challenge—there simply isn’t enough data to guide effective conservation efforts. But what if birds could help fill the gaps?

Today, I’m speaking with Dr. Josée Rousseau who explored whether birds and land cover data could serve as reliable indicators of wild bee species richness across the eastern and central U.S. By analyzing publicly available datasets on bees, birds, and land cover, they discovered that birds—sensitive to the same environmental conditions affecting bees—can provide valuable clues about bee populations in places where direct bee observations are scarce.

Dr. Josée Rousseau is an avian ecologist at Point Blue, a conservation science organization. You can read her study on using bird data to predict wild bees, or this article on the challenges of bee data. Follow her on Blue Sky: @jsrousseau.bsky.social.

Good to know

Birds and bees share a mutually beneficial relationship in ecosystems. Bees pollinate plants, supporting the growth of fruits and flowers that birds rely on for food. In turn, birds help disperse seeds, promoting plant diversity and regeneration. This natural partnership helps sustain ecosystems, creating thriving habitats for countless species.

If you’d like to learn more about some of the topics we discussed you may enjoy episode 36 where we explored how non-native bees impact native ecosystems. And if you’re motivated to help fill the gap in bee data, listen to the interview with the founder of BeeMachine, a smartphone app designed to identify and document species.

Transcript

Jacy: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Bees Knees. A podcast wild about native bees. Wild and native bees are under threat worldwide. In each episode, we look at actionable things we can do to support these adorable little guys whose pollination work is crucial for maintaining biodiversity. I’m Jacy Meyer and I thank you for being here.

Bee conservation in the United States faces a daunting challenge with more than 4,000 species, many of which are rare or limited to small geographic areas. We still lack the fundamental data needed to track their populations over time. Without a clear picture of where bees are thriving or declining, we can’t effectively guide conservation efforts or prioritize actions to protect them.

In today’s episode, I’m joined by Josée Rousseau by leveraging [00:01:00] publicly available data, not just on bees, but also on birds and land cover. Her research uncovered a surprising way to improve predictions of wild bee richness. Birds, it turns out, may serve as key indicators of bee populations helping to fill critical gaps in conservation science.

We also explore why there’s such a massive gap in information, what this means for conservation and how we can improve efforts to monitor and protect these vital pollinators. What inspired you to look at bird data to predict wild bee species in the first place?

Josee: Well, all of this started with the knowledge that we need.

Our pollinators, um, pollinators are essential for our wellbeing. They’re essential for the wellbeing of the planet, really. And you probably know that a lot of our pollinators are in trouble and they kind of need a little bit of our help to survive and to thrive. And so a team at the Cornell Atkinson Center for [00:02:00] Sustainability got together with a team from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

They wondered like, we have all these bird data. Can the bird data be an indicator of the pollinator? Can the birds kind of help save the bees? And so they were funded by the Walmart Foundation and they hired me. And when they approached me, I have tons of experience with birds. I have to be honest. I know about birds and a little bit less about bees.

And they’re like, we would like to look at the birds as indicator of pollinators. And I’m like, you want me to study insects? But it turned out it. it was awesome. It was the best thing that happened to me.

Jacy: So can you tell us about the data that you used and how did you use it?

Josee: Yes. So the data are really at the foundation of this project, and we use three different source of data.

We used land covers, and I’m gonna go into each one briefly. Land covers bird data, and of course bee data and all of them were freely [00:03:00] available online so you can have access to those as well. So the land cover is from the US Department of Agriculture. It’s originally from satellite images that covers.

Every piece of land and they categorized it into, is this a cornfield, a grassfield, a forest, a city? Is it water? And so we have those like pixels of every piece of land in the contiguous US and what they’re used for. So that was really useful. We also have bird data and birds are excellent indicator of environmental health.

The bird data I use from eBird. I don’t know if you know about eBird some people call it citizen science or community science. It’s people like you and I that are watching birds at their feeders in their, you know, in their little park and adding their observation into the eBird app. And so eBird has accumulated a couple billions of [00:04:00] observation is across the world.

We have tons of observation in the US and it’s being used. To guide conservation in the US and other places. Super useful, lots of data. And then of course we have the bee data. And going from working with like a couple billions of bird data to the bee data was kind of a shock for me because you know, there’s like at least two, three times more species of bees than birds.

You would think we should have two, three times more data on bees. And it was quite the opposite. We use data from GBIF I call it, which is the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and from SCAN, which is Symbiota collection of Tropos network. And so we use about 500,000 records, which really is not that much, but that’s what was available.

Jacy: So your study ended up finding that birds can help predict wild bee richness. How did [00:05:00] you come to this conclusion and most importantly, why do you think that is?

Josee: Yeah, so we kind of suspected that birds, we weren’t sure, we suspected that birds could be indicating, bees because they rely on the same environment.

They live in the same places, and so what’s affecting one could be affecting another one, but we weren’t sure, so we really needed to make sure that birds were adding something to the story. And so we created three models. We try to predict bees, just with land covers, which is really what most people do. We try to predict bees just with birds and we try to predict bees with land covers and birds.

And what we found is that when we combine land covers and birds, we get the best bee predictions of all of the three scenarios. And so that was great. And so thinking about it, the answer to your why that is, is that. Land cover [00:06:00] gives us kind of what the land is being used for. You know, there’s gonna be crops, there’s gonna be water.

Bees are not where there’s water. Bees will be, where there’s crops bee will be where there’s flowers. But satellite is good because you get wall to wall information about everywhere. It’s excellent. But it doesn’t tell you what’s under the trees. Is it flowering shrubs? Is it grass? Or it doesn’t tell you if there’s like a little nice patch of wild flowers here and there.

It doesn’t see that as much. The birds will because the birds are in the environment. They’re affected by what’s under the canopy. They are affected by land management. They are also affected by pesticides. And so they can be a role, you know, an indicator of these bees and they really compliment those land covers really well.

One is from satellite, one is information on the ground. Um, oh, and I should add that, [00:07:00] you know. Something we didn’t realize is by using all the bird data, we didn’t select what species of birds we would use for this. We just said, let’s the data speak. And what we realized is that some of the bird that came out as like important for the bees are the birds that actually rely on the bees for the berries and the nuts that the berries are producing.

And so there is a direct link between the two as well.

Jacy: That’s fascinating. Was there any other little insights like that that surprised you in the data?

Josee: One thing that I really liked about this project is that it made me realize that sometime having a high number of bees, a high bee richness, it’s not about having one thing in one place.

It’s about having choices. It’s about having a lot of different things within close proximity. They need place to nest. They need a lot of different flowers. They need [00:08:00] a lot of them. And sometimes they nest in trunks and sometimes they nest in the ground. And so you need trees and you need bare ground, and you need flowers from shrubs at different time of the year.

And so. It’s not by having one thing at one place, it’s by having a lot of resources within close proximity. And the birds were really good at telling us that. And this is the one thing I learned about bees that was very useful to me.

Jacy: So you touched on this a bit, but what were the biggest challenges or what are the biggest challenges in tracking wild bee data?

Is it just about the data and the lack of it, or are there other challenges?

Josee: Oh, there is definitely more than one challenge. So the lack of bee data is one thing. So why do we have so much bird data and why do we don’t have as much bee data? Well, the birds are big, bigger than the bees. They’re colorful, they sing.

You can identify them by the song. You don’t need to catch them to [00:09:00] identify them. Bees are tiny. You need to catch them. And then the thing that’s very challenging is we have many species of bees. Like in the US we have up to like 4,000 species of bees. You need a very knowledgeable taxonomist bee taxonomist to be able to identify to the species.

And so having high quality bee record, it’s a treasure. One more thing that was challenging. That I didn’t realize, and I would think most people don’t realize, is that when you compare bee richness across places, you need to know if there’s more bees in one place or another. If it’s because there is really more bee rich, uh, more bee species, or it’s because people surveyed that place more.

Because if you survey more, you’ll get more species than places you don’t survey. And that information is often not available for the bees. Often you have a bee record, you have a bee species, and no information about how it [00:10:00] was captured. Is it with a net? Is it with a trap? How much time did you spend? Did you have the trap for a week?

Did you net for five minutes? This makes a big difference in the number of species you can catch. So we spent a lot of time trying to design a way to standardize the bees across places so that the, the signal would be true.

Jacy: So how on earth did you end up doing that standardization? It took me like.

Josee: Over a year of like trying different things, um, using different source of data.

And that’s kind of one reason in the project we have, we did the same analysis twice. One with all of the bee data that I could get my hands on, but one with the. Subset of very high quality bee data that had the information about effort, about the trap, about the length of time, the duration and and the results support each other.

But our prediction of bees was much better [00:11:00] when we had information about the effort that people use to get the information about the bees.

Jacy: If you could encourage people to do just one thing to support wild bees, what would it be?

Josee: So through this project, being a bird person, I really learned about bees.

I really learned to appreciate bee, um, wild bees. And by wild bees, I mean bees that rely on natural places for their nesting and for their food, which is kind of different from honeybee, which lives in hives. That we manage. So very two different bees there. And so don’t get me wrong, we need honeybees.

They’re important. We rely on them to pollinate big fields, big crops. And of course they give us the wax and, and the honey that I love and that we all love. But honeybees are kind of a livestock. There’s billions of them. They’re nowhere close to becoming extinct. They do face challenges and the [00:12:00] scientists are working on that.

Helping them. The bigger issue is what’s happening to the wild bees. Many, wild bees are disappearing all over the world, and there are many reasons, I’m sure you know many of them, but one that is kind of less discussed is that they compete with the honeybees. They’re competing for the food and the honeybees have disease and parasites that they’re giving to the wild bees, and that’s really not helping the wild bees.

So if you’re wondering how you can help the bees, if your goal is to save the bees. Conserve the bees. The best thing you can do is not to have a honeybee hive. It’s to grow a bee garden. It’s to give the bees a place so that they nest and they use the flower to feed on. And that is something that each of us can do that really makes a difference.

And. It took me a while to realize, but that bee garden that I have, actually I have one, is not [00:13:00] only helping the wild bees, it’s also bringing something to me. So my small bee garden is two meter by one meter. It’s tiny. I have a tiny backyard and. I always love, and I still love watching birds, but I really got into watching bees, like sitting next to my garden and you know, watching birds.

We say birding, I call it bee-ing so I go bee-ing, I just sit a few minutes by my garden and I love it. You know the wild bees are not aggressive like the honeybee. They’re usually calm. They don’t have a strong venom like the honeybees. So I can sit there and I’m not worried about getting stung. And I see all kind of bees, small bees, big bees, black, yellow, red, shiny, green, even.

They have different sound. Have you heard the different sound of different bees? Um, they had different way of flying and behaving, so it really made me appreciate the diversity of life right outside [00:14:00] my door. And so sometime I go birding and sometime I go bee-ing. And, um, I really recommend both activities.

Jacy: Despite growing interest in bee conservation, the lack of comprehensive and well-documented data poses a serious obstacle in understanding population trends and taking meaningful action. We need better data, more consistent monitoring and stronger collaboration between researchers, conservationists, and the public.

Thank you for joining me today, and a big thanks to Josée for the great conversation. Please visit the website, the Bees Knees website to read more about the study we discussed. I’ve also included links to some past episodes you may enjoy. One specifically looking at the impact of non-native bee species on wild bees.

And another speaking to the founder of Bee Machine, a dedicated bee spotting app. Josee’s actionable advice is to [00:15:00] prioritize wild bees. Until next time, let’s take her advice and go bee-ing.