Bees, COVID-19, and Gen-Z: Utilizing Citizen Science and Technology to Understand Pollinator Biodiversity Shifts in the western United States National Parks

A world without pollinators is a world without a variety of ecosystem services that humans rely on in their everyday lives. However, pollinator and insect populations across the world are in peril, as widely publicized within recent studies measuring the rate of decline. The Pollinator Hotshots, a student internship team in partnership with the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation in Science is a field research team that has assesses pollinator communities within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem using citizen science, virtual databases and natural history museum collections. Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks have a wide diversity of species present within their boundaries; however, very limited data on pollinator species status exists in the greater Yellowstone Ecosystem that includes the two national parks and five national forests. Students came from local and international institutions and a diversity of educational, professional, and ethnic backgrounds to work together on three questions regarding pollinators and climate change within the parks: What is historically known for the area (species and climate variables); what is currently known for the area; and how do both of these records vary over time? Students collaborated through technological platforms such as Slack, EpiCollect5, and Zoom and collected data through online databases such as Natural History Collections, climate databases (USGS, NEON, etc.), and citizen science platforms (iNaturalist, eButterfly). This talk will discuss the partnership with Louis Stokes that created a field experience based on citizen science, natural history collections, climate data and historic records. The Pollinator Hotshot team highlights how a multicultural and diverse team of mixed undergraduate and graduate students were able to successfully implement citizen science ands emerging technology and simple cellphone apps into a robust field research project on pollinators for protected areas while also experiencing National Parks and ecological research techniques for the first time.