pollinators

Values and dependence of society on pollinators: Pensoft joins the EU project VALOR

VALOR is to prompt better understanding of our relationship with pollinators. Pensoft will lead activities related to co-developing tools for expanding engagement and interaction, and support communication, dissemination, and exploitation activities.

Animal pollinators have become a flagship for biodiversity conservation, largely due to their globally recognised role in supporting broader biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and human well-being.

Despite this recognition and the widely acknowledged benefits of pollination, many of the pressures on pollinators persist. As a result, there is growing evidence of localised yet significant deficits in pollination services, affecting both crop pollination and other communities.

Coordinated by Dr Tom Breeze (University of Reading) and funded by Horizon Europe, VALOR is a multi-actor project that will develop a comprehensive, systems-based approach to gaining a deeper understanding of the cascading impacts of pollinator shifts from flower to fork and beyond.

The project will examine the effects of pollinator shifts on ecosystems, farm businesses, and local communities through primary research and modelling.

*VALOR’s coordinator Dr Tom Breeze (UREAD) gave an introductory presentation during the project’s kick-off meeting in February (Reading, United Kingdom).*

The project aims to empower actors to develop a deeper comprehension of relationships with pollinators and will produce a range of co-developed tools for landowners, businesses, and policymakers.

These tools will facilitate a better understanding of pollination-related risks and enable users to conduct their own studies by replicating the project’s methods and applying its models. To ensure comprehensive data collection without compromising scale, VALOR will adopt a systems-based approach, employing a series of in-depth case studies in focal regions to assess the importance of pollinators.

VALOR launched in January 2025 and will be running until the end of 2028.

To achieve its goals the VALOR project has six objectives:

Co-develop a better understanding of stakeholder knowledge needs around pollinators.
Better understand the dependence of society and the economy on pollinators.
Measure and model the cascading impacts of plant-pollinator networks on ecosystems and human well-being.
Explore the consequences of pollinator loss through value chains.
Forecast the resilience of pollinator networks and human benefits under future conditions.
Co-develop tools to engage and empower actors about pollinator conservation.

Pensoft’s role

Building on its experience in communication, dissemination, and exploitation of results, Pensoft will focus on maximising the project’s impact and long-term legacy. This involves a broad scope of activities, including the development of the project’s visual identity and online presence, as well as the translation of research findings into policy recommendations.

As a leader of the work on co-developed tools for expanded engagement and interaction, Pensoft will support the development of a spatially explicit tool to allow users to explore the fine-scale changes in pollinator abundance and diversity, as well as pollination services resulting from a change in landscape management.

Moreover, Pensoft will assist the VALOR project in contributing to the Safeguard Knowledge Exchange Hub (Safe-Hub).

Pensoft will also facilitate collaboration opportunities with other projects, leveraging its expertise in numerous EU-funded projects. These efforts will be directed towards VALOR’s sister project: BUTTERFLY (101181930).

International consortium

The VALOR consortium comprises partners from thirteen European institutions, along with three associated partners, including China and Australia.

The consortium spans a wide and diverse range of scientific disciplines, from pollinator ecology, sociology, and economics to stakeholder engagement and communications.

University Of Reading (UREAD)
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU)
Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg (ALU-FR)
Jagiellonian University (UJ)
The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)
Wageningen University (WU)
Lund University (ULUND)
University of La Laguna (ULL)
University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU)
The University of Helsinki (UH)
Pensoft Publishers (PENSOFT)
World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC)
European Landowners’ Organization (ELO)
University of New England (UNE)
China West Normal University (CWNU)
Beijing Forestry University (BJFU)

The VALOR project website is coming soon!

In the meantime, follow the project’s progress via its social media channels on BlueSky and LinkedIn.

Promoting sustainable agriculture for pollinators: Pensoft joins the EU project AGRI4POL

The new Horizon project is to assist the transition of agriculture to a positive force for biodiversity, crop pollination services, ecosystems and people. Pensoft will lead the communication, dissemination, exploitation and synergies with other projects.

Threats to pollinators and pollination services that support agriculture and provide benefits to people are a worldwide problem, recognized by intergovernmental scientific assessments, national or transnational initiatives as well as policies.

Intensive agriculture is among the principal threats to pollinator biodiversity and the crop pollination services that pollinators provide. Moreover, typically crop breeding has tended to overlook the benefits of pollination for sustained crop yields in favour of other crop traits.

Coordinated by Dr. Adam Vanbergen (INRAE) and funded by Horizon Europe, the AGRI4POL project takes an ambitious and achievable interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach to achieve a transition towards sustainable pollinator-friendly farming.

*AGRI4POL kick-off meeting (February 2025, Brussels, Belgium).*

The project aims to deliver an integrated state-of-the-art analysis of the crop – farming system – pollinator interplay across levels of biological organisation from the crop gene to the agroecosystem.

AGRI4POL launched in January 2025 and will be running until the end of 2028.

To achieve its goals, AGRI4POL project has outlined six objectives:

Establish and work with a multi-actor community to drive the transition towards more pollinator friendly farming systems and value chains.
Evaluate genetic diversity of crop floral traits governing pollinator interactions to stimulate breeding of pollinator-smart varieties.
Find out how pollinator-crop relationships are modified by intra- and interspecific crop diversification in space and time.
Optimise ecological infrastructures (EI = landscape features, non-crop habitats) for crop pollination, pollinator biodiversity and multiple ecosystem benefits.
Assess the social, economic and environmental opportunities and obstacles presented by pollinator friendly farming options to understand their feasibility and acceptability.
Evaluate the influence of the policy landscape and the practitioner awareness of the benefits and challenges of pollinator-friendly farming at [sub]national, European and international scales.

*AGRI4POL’s coordinator Dr. Adam Vanbergen (INRAE) gave an introductory presentation during the project kick-off meeting in Brussels (February 2025, Belgium).*

Pensoft’s role

Building on its experience in communication, dissemination, and exploitation of results, Pensoft will focus on maximizing the project’s impact and long-term legacy. This encompasses a wide array of activities, ranging all the way from building a project’s visual identity and online presence and creating a podcast to translating results into policy recommendations. Moreover, Pensoft will be facilitating collaboration opportunities with other projects, leveraging on its involvement in numerous EU-funded projects. As of now, Pensoft takes part in six EU Pollinator projects, which serves well to facilitate synergies.

International consortium

The AGRI4POL consortium comprises partners from fourteen European institutions along with five associated partners, including China. Consortium covers a wide diverse range of scientific disciplines spanning from pollinator ecology and agriculture to stakeholder engagement and communications.

INREA (France)
INRAE Transfert (France)
Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ (Germany)
The University of Reading (United Kingdom)
Wageningen University and Research (Netherlands)
Lund University (Sweden)
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) (Spain)
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg (Germany)
Pensoft Publishers (Bulgaria)
Global Change Research Institute – Ustav Vyzkumu Globalni Zmeny Av Cr Vvi (CzechGlobe) (Czech Republic)
Université de Mons (Belgium)
University of Ljubljana – Univerza v Ljubljani (Slovenia)
Università degli Studi di Padova (Italy)
WCMC LBG – UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre (global)
Associació Paisatages Vius – Living Landscapes (global)
Maisadour Semences Romania SRL – MAS Seeds (Romania)
Confederazione Italiana Agricoltori (Italy)
Eidgenoessisches Departement fuer Wirtschaft, Bildung und Forschung (WBF-Agroscope) (Italy)
Swiss Association for the Development of Agriculture and Rural Areas (Switzerland)
Institute of Apicultural Research – Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences
China West Normal University
Gansu Agriculture University

The AGRI4POL project website is coming soon!

In the meantime, follow the project’s progress via its social media channels on BlueSky and LinkedIn.

MAkiNg Technology work for moNitoring polliNAtors: Pensoft joins ANTENNA

Pensoft is to maximise the project’s impact by informing stakeholders about results and raising public awareness about pollinators.

Pensoft joins the newly funded Biodiversa+ project ANTENNA focused on making technology work for monitoring pollinators and is tasked with the communication, dissemination and exploitation activities.

The overarching goal of ANTENNA is to fill key monitoring gaps through advancing innovative technologies that will underpin and complement EU-wide pollinator monitoring schemes, and to provide tested transnational pipelines from monitoring activities to curated datasets and enhanced indicators that support pollinator-relevant policy and end-users.

The ANTENNA project answers the BiodivMon call, which was launched in September 2022 by Biodiversa+ in collaboration with the European Commission. The BiodivMon call sought proposals for three-year research projects to improve transnational monitoring of biodiversity and ecosystem change, emphasising innovation and harmonisation of biodiversity data collection and management methodologies, addressing knowledge gaps on biodiversity status and trends to combat biodiversity loss, and the effective use of existing biodiversity monitoring data.

Supporting the work of Work Package #5: “Project coordination, and communication”, Pensoft is dedicated to maximising the project’s impact by employing a mix of channels to inform stakeholders about the results from ANTENNA and raise public awareness about pollinators.

Pensoft is also tasked with creating and maintaining a clear and recognisable project brand, promotional materials, website, social network profiles, internal communication platform, and online libraries. Another key responsibility is the development, implementation and regular updates of the project’s communication, dissemination and exploitation plans, that ANTENNA is set to follow for the next four years.

On 14-15 March 2024, ANTENNA held its official kick off meeting. Project partners came together in Halle, Germany for two days to outline objectives, discuss strategies, and set the groundwork for this venture.

Specifically, the combined expertise of the consortium will address the following objectives:

Advance automated sample sorting and image recognition tools from individual prototypes to systems that can be adopted by practitioners
Expand pollinator monitoring to under-researched pollinator taxa, ecosystems, and pressures
Quantify the added value of novel monitoring systems in comparison and combination with ‘traditional’ methods in terms of cost effectiveness
Provide a framework for integrative monitoring by combining multiple data streams and. The framework will also support the development of near real-time forecasting models as bases for early warning systems;
Upscale local demonstrations into the implementation of large-scale transnational pipelines and provide context-specific guidance to the use of policy-makers and other users who might need to select monitoring methods and indicators.

Consortium*:

Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), Germany
Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Netherlands
Aarhus University, Denmark
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Spain
University of the Aegean, Greece
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

*Pensoft Publishers is a subcontractor tasked by the UFZ with multiple communication, dissemination and exploitation activities as part of Work Package 5.

Stay up to date with the ANTENNA project’s progress on X/Twitter (@ANTENNA_project) and LinkedIn (/antenna-project).

Moving towards a systems-based Environmental Risk Assessment for wild bees, butterflies, moths and hoverflies: Pensoft joins PollinERA

Pensoft will lead the communication, dissemination and exploitation activities of the Horizon Europe project, which aims to reverse pollinator population declines and reduce impacts of pesticides.

The European Green Deal, the EU biodiversity strategy, the EU zero pollution action plan, and the revised EU pollinators initiative all indicate the need to protect pollinators and address insect and pollinator declines.

Plant protection products (PPP), also known as pesticides, have been identified as one of the primary triggers of pollinator decline. However, significant knowledge gaps and critical procedural limitations to current pesticide risk assessment require attention before meaningful improvements can be realised. The functional group is currently represented by only one species, the honey bee, which does not necessarily share other species’ biological and ecological traits.

Coordinated by The Social-Ecological Systems Simulation (SESS) Centre, Aarhus University and Prof. Christopher J. Topping, PollinERA (Understanding pesticide-Pollinator interactions to support EU Environmental Risk Assessment and policy) aims to move the evaluation of the risk and impacts of pesticides and suggestions for mitigation beyond the current situation of assessing single pesticides in isolation on honey bees to an ecologically consistent assessment of effects on insect pollinators.

This will be achieved through the development of a new systems-based environmental risk assessment (ERA) scheme, tools and protocols for a broad range of toxicological testing, feeding to in silico models (QSARS, toxicokinetic/toxicodynamic, and ALMaSS agent-based population simulations).

Using a strong stakeholder co-development approach, these models will be combined in a One System framework for risk assessment and policy evaluation including an international long-term monitoring scheme for pollinators and pesticides.

The One System framework builds on the recent roadmap for action on the ERA of chemicals for insect pollinators, developed within the IPol‐ERA project, funded by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). The framework will expand the ERA tools currently used for honey bees to include wild bees, butterflies, moths and hoverflies.

With an overall goal of reversing pollinator population declines and reducing the harmful impacts of pesticides, for the next four years, PollinERA will follow four specific objectives:

Fill ecotoxicological data gaps to enable realistic prediction of the source and routes of exposure and the impact of pesticides on pollinators and their sensitivity to individual pesticides and mixtures.
Develop and test a co-monitoring scheme for pesticides and pollinators across European cropping systems and landscapes, developing risk indicators and exposure information.
Develop models for predicting pesticide toxicological effects on pollinators for chemicals and organisms, improve toxicokinetic/toxicodynamic (TKTD) and population models, and predict environment fate.
Develop a population-level systems-based approach to risk and policy assessment considering multiple stressors and long-term spatiotemporal dynamics at a landscape scale and generate an open database for pollinator/pesticide data and tools.

Between 17 and 18 January 2024, experts from various realms of knowledge – from pollinator ecology, pesticide exposure and toxicological testing, to stakeholder engagement and communications – gathered in Aarhus, Denmark, to officially launch PollinERA. The two-day event seeded fruitful discussions on the project’s specific objectives, mission, methodology, outcomes and expected results.

With more than 20 years of experience in science communication, Pensoft is leading Work Package 6: Communication, Dissemination and Exploitation, that will ensure the effective outreach of PollinERA to its multiple target audiences. Based on the tailor-made communication, dissemination, exploitation and engagement strategies, Pensoft will provide a recognisable visual identity of the project, along with a user-friendly website, social media profiles, promotional materials, newsletters, infographics and videos. Pensoft will also contribute to the stakeholder mapping process and the organisation of various workshops and events.

To support the proactive, open-science transfer of results and scientific achievements, two PollinERA topical collections of articles will be established in Pensoft’s Food and Ecological Systems Modelling Journal (FESMJ) and the Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) journal.

PollinERA’s coordinator Prof. Christopher J. Topping (The Social-Ecological Systems Simulation Centre, Aarhus University) gave a warm welcome during the kick-off meeting of the project in Aarhus, Denmark.

In a joint effort to maximise impact and ensure sustainability of results, PollinERA will unfold in close collaboration with the sister Horizon Europe-funded project WildPosh, where Pensoft is also leading the Communication, dissemination and exploitation work package.

Coordinated by Prof. Denis Michez (University of Mons), WildPosh aims to significantly improve the evaluation of risk to pesticide exposure of wild pollinators, and enhance the sustainable health of pollinators and pollination services in Europe.

Collaboration mechanisms between the PollinERA and the WildPosh projects include joint communication activities and events, joint data management strategy and alignment of activities to solidify the quality of final outputs.

Prof. Denis Michez (University of Mons), the coordinator of PollinERA’s sister-project WildPosh, presented the missions, objectives and methods, as well as the similarities, differences and collaboration potential between the two projects at PollinERA’s kick-off meeting in Aarhus, Denmark.

“It is fantastic that the European Commission puts so much effort into preserving wild pollinators and the countless benefits they bring to our society! The One System framework will hopefully become a fundamental part for the environmental risk assessment of chemicals for insect pollinators. I am really looking forward to implementing this insightful project, in close collaboration with its sister project WildPosh, where Pensoft is leading the dissemination efforts as well.”
says Teodor Metodiev, Principal Investigator for Pensoft at both PollinERA and WildPosh.

The PollinERA consortium comprises partners from eight European countries that represent a diverse range of scientific disciplines spanning from pollinator ecology, pesticide exposure and toxicological testing, to stakeholder engagement and communications.

Consortium:

Stay up to date with the PollinERA project’s progress on X/Twitter (@pollinERA_eu) and LinkedIn (/pollinera-eu).

Assessment, monitoring, and mitigation of chemical stressors on the health of wild pollinators: Pensoft joins WildPosh

Assessment, monitoring, and mitigation of chemical stressors on the health of wild pollinators: Pensoft joins WildPosh

Pensoft is amongst the participants of a new Horizon Europe project aiming to better evaluate the risk to wild pollinators of pesticide exposure, enhancing their health & pollination services.

Wild fauna and flora are facing variable and challenging environmental disturbances. One of the animal groups that is most impacted by these disturbances are pollinators, which face multiple threats, driven to a huge extent by the spread of anthropogenic chemicals, such as pesticides.

WildPosh (Pan-european assessment, monitoring, and mitigation of chemical stressors on the health of wild pollinators) is a multi-actor, transdisciplinary project whose overarching mission and ambition are to significantly improve the evaluation of the risk to wild pollinators of pesticide exposure, and enhance the sustainable health of pollinators and pollination services in Europe.

On 25 and 26 January 2024, project partners from across Europe met for the first time in Mons, Belgium and marked the beginning of the 4-year endeavour that is WildPosh. During the two days of the meeting, the partners had the chance to discuss objectives and strategies and plan their work ahead.

This aligns with the objectives of the European Green Deal and EU biodiversity strategy for 2030, emphasising the need to reduce pollution and safeguard pollinators. WildPosh focuses on understanding the routes of chemical exposure, evaluating toxicological effects, and developing preventive measures. By addressing knowledge gaps in pesticide risk assessment for wild pollinators, the project contributes to broader efforts in biodiversity conservation.

During the kick-off meeting in Mons, WildPosh’s project coordinator Prof. Denis Michez (University of Mons, Belgium) gave an introductory presentation.

As a leader of Work Package #7: “Communication, knowledge exchange and impact”, Pensoft is dedicated to maximising the project’s impact by employing a mix of channels in order to inform stakeholders about the results from WildPosh and raise further public awareness of wild and managed bees’ health.

Pensoft is also tasked with creating and maintaining a clear and recognisable project brand, promotional materials, website, social network profiles, internal communication platform, and online libraries. Another key responsibility is the development, implementation and regular updates of the project’s communication, dissemination and exploitation plans, that WildPosh is set to follow for the next four years.

“It is very exciting to build on the recently concluded PoshBee project, which set out to provide a holistic understanding of how chemicals affect health in honey bees, bumble bees, and solitary bees, and reveal how stressors interact to threaten bee health. WildPosh will continue this insightful work by investigating these effects on wild pollinators, such as butterflies, hoverflies and wild bee species, with the ultimate goal of protecting these small heroes who benefit the well-being of our planet,”
says Teodor Metodiev, WildPosh Principal Investigator for Pensoft.

For the next four years, WildPosh will be working towards five core objectives:

1) Determine the real-world agrochemical exposure profile of wild pollinators at landscape level within and among sites

2) Characterise causal relationships between pesticides and pollinator health

3) Build open database on pollinator traits/distribution and chemicals to define exposure and toxicity scenario

4) Propose new tools for risk assessment on wild pollinators

5) Drive policy and practice.

Consortium:

The consortium consists of 17 partners coming from 10 European countries. Together, they bring extensive experience in Research and Innovation projects conducted within the Horizon programmes, as well as excellent scientific knowledge of chemistry, modelling, nutritional ecology, proteomics, environmental chemistry and nutritional biology.

Visit can follow WildPosh on X/Twitter (@WildPoshProject), Instagram (/wildposhproject) and Linkedin (/wildposh-eu)

Study reveals new records for the Serbian wild bee fauna

This new study not only presents new records of bee species in Serbia and confirms some old ones, but also provides additional information about European distribution.

Pollinators play a crucial role in our ecosystems by pollinating flowering plants and crops, contributing to the planetary and human well-being. During the past decade, the decline in insect pollinators has become a more and more disturbing issue that countless scientific and public communities are trying to tackle every day.

Published in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research, a new study aims to contribute to updating the knowledge on wild bee diversity in Serbia, necessary for determining conservation priorities and future endeavours at the national level, but also for improving the understanding of the status of European pollinators. The study is also making an attempt to upgrade the exciting data provided by the recently published checklist of European bees, European bees country records, and, focusing on Serbia, a preliminary list of 706 bee species.

Map of Serbia showing the localities where bee specimens were collected.

To do that, researchers used data from the implementation of the national project SPAS, and within the EU-funded project Safeguard. With the aim of monitoring the diversity and abundance of insect pollinators in Serbia, 54 sites were surveyed three times throughout the 2022 season.

The transect walks and pan traps used for the assessment led to the discovery of 312 bee species. Results show that 25 of these have not been previously recorded for Serbia. Furthermore, the study confirms the presence of 26 species, without any available records from the 21st century.

Graphic view of the number of species detected depending on the sampling methods A at all studied sites B at a subset of sites where both sampling methods were conducted.

The authors also share that 79 of the examined species were known only from literature-based data and six of the recorded species are considered threatened with 67 (10 newly recorded) assessed as Data Deficient in the European Red List of Bees. In addition, the study manages to achieve the goal of updating the current knowledge of bee species occurring in Serbia. By recording 25 new species, the Safeguard study successfully extends the national list with new recordings – from 706 to 731 species.

This new study not only presents new records of bee species in Serbia and confirms some old ones, but also provides additional information about European distribution, required for new assessment at the European level.

Research article:

Mudri-Stojnić S, Andrić A, Józan Z, Likov L, Tot T, Grković A, Vujić A (2023) New records for the wild bee fauna (Hymenoptera, Anthophila) of Serbia. Journal of Hymenoptera Research 96: 761-781. https://doi.org/10.3897/jhr.96.107595

Natural history collections shed light on bumblebees’ modern struggles

Using pollen metabarcoding, researchers analyzed historical and recent bee specimens, revealing significant shifts in foraging patterns.

A new study highlights potential causes for changing foraging habits of bumblebees. Using advanced molecular techniques called pollen metabarcoding, researchers investigated interactions between bumblebees and plants in Cuxhaven, Germany, and how they changed over 60 years. Their findings can help us understand the connections between availability of floral resources and changing landscapes.

The study, led by the Botany Department of the University of Kassel (Germany) in collaboration with the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change (Germany), used bumblebee specimens from historical museum collections dating back to 1968/69 and compared them with bumblebees collected in the field in 2019. By analyzing pollen samples attached to the bodies of the bees, the researchers were able to identify the plant species they had interacted with.

The results revealed significant shifts in the foraging habits of bumblebees between the late 1960s and more recent sampling periods. In particular, there was a noticeable decrease in interactions with Fabaceae plants in 2019 compared to the past. “This suggests that changes in the landscape have led to alterations in the availability of floral resources, which may contribute to the decline of specialized bee species,” the researchers explain.

“The successful application of scalable molecular techniques to analyze historical pollen samples highlights the value of museum collections as a valuable resource for biodiversity research,” they add. “This study, published in the journal Metabarcoding and Metagenomics, serves as a proof of concept for comparative analysis of recent and historical pollination data, providing important insights into the changes in foraging trends of bumblebees over time.”

“In conclusion, this study contributes to our understanding of bumblebee interactions with foraging resources and the impact of landscape changes on their foraging habits,” say the researchers. Their findings underscore the importance of conserving and restoring suitable habitats for pollinators.

“Future research in this field is expected to provide valuable insights for the conservation and management of pollinators and their critical role in maintaining ecosystems,” they conclude.

Original source:

Kolter A, Husemann M, Podsiadlowski L, Gemeinholzer B (2023) Pollen metabarcoding of museum specimens and recently collected bumblebees (Bombus) indicates foraging shifts. Metabarcoding and Metagenomics 7: e86883. https://doi.org/10.3897/mbmg.7.86883

Images by Andreas Kolter

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Recruiting participants to the first European Red list of insect taxonomists

Contributors will enable the EU to take action to plug in the essential scientific knowledge to address insect declines

The ‘Red List of Taxonomists’ initiative, funded by the European Union, launches its registration portal, where professionals and citizen scientists are called to register on. The purpose is to build a database of European taxonomy experts in the field of entomology, the biological discipline dedicated to insects. The analysis of these data will elucidate the trends in available expertise, thereby forming the basis of key recommendations for policy makers to further allocate necessary efforts and funds to support taxonomists’ work and contribute to protecting European biodiversity and beyond.

Globally, insect populations have been catastrophically plummeting over the last decades. According to the first major Europe-wide survey of honeybee colonies, conducted in 2013, some European countries lost as many as one-third of their colonies every winter. On the other hand, estimates state, the European agriculture industry alone ‘owes’ at least €22 billion per year to honey bees and wild bees, in addition to many species from other insect orders, as together they ensure pollination for over 80% of crops and wild plants in Europe.

Insect pollination of plants is an irreplaceable service to people
**Photo:** Lenka Z (pexels)

The health of European pollinators on species and population level and other insects essential in our ecosystems strongly relies on our ability to rapidly turn the growing awareness about these worrying trends into swift, decisive actions. These decisions are crucial to mitigate the negative impacts of these alarming trends in human activities, mainly industrial agriculture. Taxonomists – the people who can identify, discover and monitor insect species – have a decisive role to play.

Often specialised in specific insect groups, they can investigate the diversity and abundance of insects. To a great concern, the numbers of trained insect taxonomists seem also to be fast declining. There is the real danger of losing numerous species before we get the chance to even learn about their existence!

On a more positive note, while species extinction is an irreversible event, certain taxonomic expertise can be nourished and ‘brought back to life’ if only we have the data and analyses to bring to the attention of the relevant education institutions, governments and policy-makers, so that the necessary resources are allocated to education, training, career support and recognition.

This is how the ‘Red List of Taxonomists’ project, an initiative by the organisation uniting the most important and largest European natural science collections (CETAF), the world’s authority on assessing the risk of extinction of organisms: the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the scientific publisher with a long history in the biodiversity and ecology fields: Pensoft, and funded by the European Commission, comes into play. Launched earlier this year, the ‘Red List of Taxonomists’ aims to compile the very first inventory of taxonomic expertise for any group of organisms, understandably choosing the class of insects.

Bringing together scientists, research institutions and learned societies from across Europe, the project will compare the trends and extract recommendations to overcome the risks, while preserving and further evolving the expert capacity of this scientific community.

The precious skills of insect taxonomists must be preserved and developed
Photo: Grafvision, Adobe Stock

As partners of the project, CETAF and IUCN are mobilising experts from their respective networks to populate the ‘Red List of Taxonomists’ database. In parallel, Pensoft is extracting further data of authors, reviewers and editors from taxonomic publications across its portfolio of academic journals and books, in addition to major relevant databases working with scholarly literature.

To reach experts, including professionals not necessarily affiliated with partnering institutions, as well as citizen scientists, the team is now calling for European taxonomists to register via the newly launched ‘Red List of Taxonomists’ portal and provide their data by filling a short survey. Their data will not be publicly available, but it will be used for in-depth analyses and reports in the concluding stage of the project, scheduled for early 2022. The collection of the data is in full compliance with GDPR requirements.

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Insect taxonomists, both professional and citizen scientists, are welcome to register on the Red List of Taxonomists portal at: red-list-taxonomists.eu and further disseminate the registration portal to fellow taxonomists.

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Follow and join the conversation on Twitter using the #RedListTaxonomists hashtag.

Bees thrive where it’s hot and dry: a unique biodiversity hotspot located in North America

The United States-Mexico border traverses through large expanses of unspoiled land in North America, including a newly discovered worldwide hotspot of bee diversity. Concentrated in 16 km² of protected Chihuahuan Desert are more than 470 bee species, a remarkable 14% of the known United States bee fauna.

One of the late-summer desert bees, female *Svastra* sp. on flower of *Verbesina enceliodes*. Photo by Bruce D. Taubert

This globally unmatched concentration of bee species is reported by Dr. Robert Minckley of the University of Rochester and William Radke of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in the open-access, peer-reviewed Journal of Hymenoptera Research.

Scientists studying native U.S. bees have long recognized that the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts of North America, home to species with interesting life histories, have high bee biodiversity. Exactly how many species has largely remained speculation. Together with students from Mexico, Guatemala and the United States, the authors made repeated collections over multiple years, identifying more than 70,000 specimens.

Without such intensive collecting, a full picture of the bee diversity would not have been possible. Most of these bee species are solitary, without a queen or workers, which visit flowers over a 2-4 week lifespan and specialize on pollen and nectar from one to a few plants. Furthermore, these desert species experience periodic drought, which the immature stages survive by going into dormancy for years, much like the seeds of the desert plants they pollinate.

One of the spring-active desert bees, female *Centris caesalpiniae* on flower of *Krameria*. Photo by Bruce D. Taubert

Additionally, bee diversity is notoriously difficult to estimate and compare among studies, because of differences in the collecting techniques and the size of the studied area. An unexpected benefit of the regular and intensive sampling for this study was the opportunity to test if the observed bee diversity approached the true bee diversity in this region, or if many more species were yet to be found. In this case, the larger San Bernardino Valley area is home to 500 bee species, only slightly above the number of species recovered along the border – an unusually robust confirmation of the researchers’ estimate.

One of the spring-active desert bees, male *Centris caesalpiniae* on flower of *Acacia*. Photo by Bruce D. Taubert

What we know about the decline of bees due to human activity, along with that of other pollinators, is based primarily on diversity data from human-modified habitats. Needed is baseline information on native bees from pristine areas to help us assess the magnitude and understand the ways in which humans impact bee faunas. This study from the Chihuahuan Desert is therefore an important contribution towards filling that knowledge gap from one of the bee biodiversity hotspots in the world.

Original source

Minckley RL, Radke WR (2021) Extreme species density of bees (Apiformes, Hymenoptera) in the warm deserts of North America. Journal of Hymenoptera Research 82: 317-345. https://doi.org/10.3897/jhr.82.60895

Scientists unravel the evolution and relationships for all European butterflies in a first

For the first time, a complete time-calibrated phylogeny for a large group of invertebrates is published for an entire continent. A German-Swedish team of scientists provide a diagrammatic hypothesis of the relationships and evolutionary history for all 496 European species of butterflies currently in existence. Their study provides an important tool for evolutionary and ecological research, meant for the use of insect and ecosystem conservation.

For the first time, a complete time-calibrated phylogeny for a large group of invertebrates is published for an entire continent.

The figure shows the relationships of the 496 extant European butterfly species in the course of their evolution during the last 100 million years.
*Image by Dr Martin Wiemers*

In a recent research paper in the open-access, peer-reviewed academic journal ZooKeys, a German-Swedish team of scientists provide a diagrammatic hypothesis of the relationships and evolutionary history for all 496 European species of butterflies currently in existence. Their study provides an important tool for evolutionary and ecological research, meant for the use of insect and ecosystem conservation.

In order to analyse the ancestral relationships and history of evolutionary divergence of all European butterflies currently inhabiting the Old continent, the team led by Martin Wiemers – affiliated with both the Senckenberg German Entomological Institute and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, mainly used molecular data from already published sources available from NCBI GenBank, but also contributed many new sequences, some from very local endemics for which no molecular data had previously been available.

The phylogenetic tree also includes butterfly species that have only recently been discovered using molecular methods. An example is this Blue (*Polyommatus celina*), which looks similar to the Common Blue. It used to be mistaken for the Common Blue in the Canary Islands and the southwestern part of the Mediterranean Region.
*Photo by Dr Martin Wiemers*

Butterflies, the spectacular members of the superfamily Papilionoidea, are seen as an important proponent for nature conservation, as they present an excellent indicator group of species, meaning they are capable of inferring the environmental conditions of a particular habitat. All in all, if the local populations of butterflies are thriving, so is their habitat.

Furthermore, butterflies are pollinating insects, which are of particular importance for the survival of humans. There is no doubt they have every right to be recognised as a flagship invertebrate group for conservation.

While many European butterflies are seriously threatened, this one: Madeiran Large White (Pieris wollastoni) is already extinct. The study includes the first sequence of this Madeiran endemic which was recorded in 1986 for the last time. The tree demonstrates that it was closely related to the Canary Island Large White (Pieris cheiranthi), another threatened endemic butterfly, which survives only on Tenerife and La Palma, but is already extinct on La Gomera.
Photo by Dr Martin Wiemers

In recent times, there has been a steady increase in the molecular data available for research, however, those would have been only used for studies restricted either to a selected subset of species, or to small geographic areas. Even though a complete phylogeny of European butterflies was published in 2019, also co-authored by Wiemers, it was not based on a global backbone phylogeny and, therefore, was also not time-calibrated.

In their paper, Wiemers and his team point out that phylogenies are increasingly used across diverse areas of macroecological research, such as studies on large-scale diversity patterns, disentangling historical and contemporary processes, latitudinal diversity gradients or improving species-area relationships. Therefore, this new phylogeny is supposed to help advance further similar ecological research.

The study includes molecular data from 18 localised endemics with no public DNA sequences previously available, such as the Canary Grayling (Hipparchia wyssii), which is only found on the island of Tenerife (Spain).
Photo by Dr Martin Wiemers

Original source:

Wiemers M, Chazot N, Wheat CW, Schweiger O, Wahlberg N (2020) A complete time-calibrated multi-gene phylogeny of the European butterflies. ZooKeys 938: 97-124. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.938.50878