ABSTRACT

The conservation of plant–pollinator interactions is important to preserve the mutualism that provides much of the food that humans consume. This interaction is at risk due to factors including climate change, which may shift differentially the phenology of events like flowering and emergence of bee-introduced diseases and parasites that are detrimental to pollinators, and other environmental changes. Our understanding of the conse quences of these threats is limited by our lack of knowledge of the distribution and abundance of pollinator populations, but both honey bees and bumble bees have declined in recent years. Data collection by both scientists and citizen-scientists is helping to solve this problem, for both urban and field studies.