2023/11/02 by James B. Dorey, Erica E. Fischer, Paige Chesshire +27 · 1 voice
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Environmental Science · #Plant and animal studies #Insect and Pesticide Research #Species Distribution and Climate Change
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41597-023-02626-w
openalex publication_date 2023/11/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/27
Species occurrence data are foundational for research, conservation, and science communication, but the limited availability and accessibility of reliable data represents a major obstacle, particularly for insects, which face mounting pressures. We present BeeBDC, a new R package, and a global bee occurrence dataset to address this issue. We combined >18.3 million bee occurrence records from multiple public repositories (GBIF, SCAN, iDigBio, USGS, ALA) and smaller datasets, then standardised, flagged, deduplicated, and cleaned the data using the reproducible BeeBDC R-workflow. Specifically, we harmonised species names (following established global taxonomy), country names, and collection dates and, we added record-level flags for a series of potential quality issues. These data are provided in two formats, "cleaned" and "flagged-but-uncleaned". The BeeBDC package with online documentation provides end users the ability to modify filtering parameters to address their research questions. By publishing reproducible R workflows and globally cleaned datasets, we can increase the accessibility and reliability of downstream analyses. This workflow can be implemented for other taxa to support research and conservation.