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Pop the Champagne, we just turned ONE! 🍾.
365 days, 4 360 Volunteers, 25 540 Videos of Flowers and 143 443 Classifications of Insects
Despite all of the chaos this year has brought, one thing remains certain. How grateful I am for all the citizen scientists who have helped make our work across Buzzy Bee – African Canopy Pollinators. Thank you for every like, follow, classification, question and feedback. Without the information gathered by volunteers, much of the work done to identify insect pollinators of large African timber trees simply would not be possible.
The willingness of participants to join together and work collaboratively has also led to the inclusion in this year's 'Into the Zooniverse' book’ highlighting 20 projects chosen from the more than 150 projects active on the Zooniverse platform in the 2020 – 21 academic year.
The link to the PDF version of the book, as well as details on how to order a hard copy, if of interest, are here: https://www.zooniverse.org/about/highlights
Research
What secrets lie in the canopy?
Central African timber species can reach up to 60m tall and are usually branchless up to 30m height. As a result, studies on their regeneration cycle are often limited to the phases that can be monitored from the ground, leaving what is restricted to the canopy layer virtually unknown. However, a crucial step of tree reproduction only occurs in the canopy, and that is pollination. As the canopy holds most of the animal diversity and especially invertebrates, one might understand why the vast majority of flowering plants are specialized for pollination by insects. Because insects and canopy trees play such intimate roles in the life cycles of each other, knowledge on pollination could help us fill the gap that hinders the development of sustainable forest management practices.
Large insects diversity, healthier forest.
When people think of pollinators, honey bees and butterflies often come to mind first but the diversity is far greater with moths, flies, wasps, beetles, mosquitoes, and midges also playing a role in tree pollination. In exchange for pollination services, flowers provide food and shelter for insects. The relationship between the trees and their pollinators is actually so intimate that if pollinator populations decline, the impact on their plant associates would be rapid and terrible. If we study when, where, and how insects spend their time on flowers, we can get a better idea of the size and the composition of the pollinators community as well as their degree of specialization.
You can watch videos to help us learn about timber tree species and their pollinators.
For this study, we collected nearly 600 hours of footages from home-made camera traps specially designed for this purpose and from 12 trees belonging to 9 different timber tree species in Cameroon and Gabon. (We are also collecting insects using different types of insect traps and sweep nets as well as plant samples on each tree.) By watching these videos and identifying the types of insects and activity that you observe, you will help us identify potential pollinators and improve our understanding of the timber tree species regeneration cycle.
Our opinion is that the more we understand, the better we preserve.
Central Africa hosts the second-largest block of tropical forest and approximately a third is exploited for timber production, placing logging as the most important type of land use. At the same time, it is commonly acknowledged that insects and pollinators are declining worldwide for the past decades. To fully understand and better preserve tropical forests biome, we need to get the big picture. In addition to helping us identify pollinators of several timber species, this project will also document other insects visiting the flowers, such as herbivores, predators, and so on... We hope that this fundamental knowledge of insect communities relying upon timber tree species will provide relevant information for studies engaged in characterising interaction networks and assessing the impact of logging on timber species natural regeneration and on canopy insects.