This report summarizes efforts to date to assemble a global checklist of the world’s bees through various initiatives and provides the current status of these efforts.  Comments and suggestions are welcome.

In 2006, a global bee checklist became a high priority and a common, critical component for meeting the demands of the following pollinator information initiatives.  They represent different but complementary approaches for providing access to information on pollinator species.  

• The Inter-American Biodiversity Information Network (IABIN) has a Pollinators Thematic Network as a component of its work program. The IABIN efforts are focused on mobilizing occurrence data in the Americas (served through the GBIF network) and providing additional data about plant-pollinator interactions.
• The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) seeks to foster the development of thematic campaigns and has targeted pollinators as a one of these campaigns. GBIF provides basic infrastructure to access and serve biodiversity data and currently serves occurrence data.  The GBIF ECAT program assembles taxonomic and nomenclatural checklist data into an informatics toolset for data management. 
• The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) is pursuing the development of a Pollinators Information Management System. The FAO seeks to access these data via GBIF and IABIN networks and synthesize them into derived data products (identification guides, crop pollinator lists, associated species, habitat descriptions, etc.) for targeted groups of interest to FAO:  agricultural groups, policy makers, etc.
• The Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS), as a partner in the Catalogue of Life, seeks to promote the development of a checklist of all the world’s species, which naturally includes the Apoidea. ITIS works to synthesize many parallel taxonomic efforts into a unified data structure that contributes to ECAT as well as to the ITIS service itself.

All of these activities benefit from access to a current and authoritative global checklist of bee species. Data mobilization activities with access to informatics services that utilize such a checklist can organize and present data in a manner consistent with current taxonomic hypotheses.  GBIF uses checklists to enable data to be organized by taxonomic groups, and to reconcile records labeled with synonyms.  GBIF, IABIN, and FAO use checklists as the referent structure for organizing data into valid species units.

In October of 2002, the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) and Centro de Referência em Informação Ambiental (CRIA) hosted a workshop in Indaituba, Brazil to identify the issues of assembling a global bee checklist.  Participants (Annex 1) contributed geographic and taxonomic checklists which were transformed by David Remsen into a common database format for collation and presentation in a consistent form.  Participants reviewed this list in order to identify gaps and assemble a new synthesized checklist.  They discussed how to develop an infrastructure to continue this process over the Internet.  An exemplar taxonomic group, the world Colletinae, was completed in draft during the meeting.  Commitments were made by several participants to fill gaps after the meeting.  Nearctic, Neotropical, and Afrotropical checklists were planned for completion and collation.

In 2006 Michael Ruggiero coordinated the development of the GBIF Pollinators “Proto-campaign” that sought to mobilize both taxonomic and occurrence data relating to bees. A team of key advisors was created to provide technical input and serve as regional “champions” for the project.  This group includes Connal Eardley (South Africa), Terry Griswold (USA), Peter Kwapong (Ghana), Gabriel Melo (Brazil), Andrew Polaszek (UK), Osamu Tadauchi (Japan), and Ken Walker (Australia).   Among the goals was to identify and catalog regional checklists that would contribute the raw materials for a global checklist of bees.  The 2006 goal was to assemble an 80% complete global checklist of bee species.  

An expert’s workshop was held in Amsterdam (7-8 November 2006) and included participants from Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa (Annex 1).  A second workshop was held in Indaiatuba, Brazil (12-15 December 2006), jointly with the Inter-American Biodiversity Information Network (IABIN), and included participants from the Americas (Annex 1).     

Primary data providers for the Global Bee Checklist were identified and contacted.  All provided permission to use their data to build the checklist.  Principal data suppliers included Terry Griswold (North and Middle America and Carribean), Andrew Polaszek (Europe), Connal Eardley (Africa), Gabriel Melo (South America), Ken Walker (Australia), Osamu Tadauchi (Asia), Paul Williams (Bombus species), and John Ascher (global Apoidea species).  This has resulted in a relatively complete but provisional names list of approximately 18,000 taxa.

 

Our plan now is twofold:

• First, we will support a bee taxonomist at the Smithsonian Institution to validate and refine the current provisional list into a complete, synthesized global checklist, organized around the Michener classification. This is being administered by ITIS with support from GBIF. 
• Second, David Remsen and John Ascher are working with the European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy (EDIT) to develop a collaborative platform (Figure 1) for the continued curation of the global bee checklist by the bee community itself.  The intent of this platform is to create a communications forum and toolset that gives commmunal control, visibility, transparency and involvement in the initiatives discussed above.  The platform will provide the sort of collaborative process over the Internet that was envisioned in 2002.   It will serve as a focal point for communications, data services and communal involvement.  

Our intent is to merge these two tracks by populating the collaboration site with the content developed by the ITIS-coordinated work.  In this way, the maintenance of the global bee checklist can be a continual and collaborative process and its access and subsequent uses transparent to the community that maintains it.

We hope that this report has helped to clarify the various ongoing efforts that contribute to the development and maintenance of a global bee checklist.  It is important to recognize the need for continuity and clear communication among all who are contributing to this important effort.