March 17, 2021, via Zoom webinar With more than 20,000 species globally, bees provide us with vital pollination services that help feed us and maintain diverse and healthy ecosystems. Mounting evidence of declines in many species is therefore troubling. Efforts are underway to help us understand why, where, and which bee species are in trouble so that we can apply that knowledge to their conservation. One of the most important steps in conservation science is to identify species so that their population sizes in different locations can be measured and monitored through time. However, bees are notoriously difficult to identify, which leads to a time consuming and expensive bottleneck for conservation research. Promising new techniques in AI and computer vision, originally developed for self-driving cars, are now being applied to the problem of bee identification and will soon help remove this bottleneck. BeeMachine, for example is a web-based tool that can be used by anyone to automatically identify North American bumble bee species from photos. We are working to expand the scale of the app to include more types of bees across the globe. This will provide access for education, nature enthusiasts, and integration into large scale monitoring programs. I will talk about the current state of the art in computer vision for bee research, where we are headed, and how you can get involved. The speaker: Dr. Brian Spiesman is Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Entomology at Kansas State University where he studies relationships between insects, plants, and the environment. His research focuses on how species are distributed in space and time. The Spiesman Ecology Lab studies how environmental change affects the biodiversity of pollinators, the plants they rely on, and their ability to perform essential pollination services. Dr. Spiesman and his students are also developing new ways to automate the observation and identification of pollinators using machine learning and computer vision. He earned a BS from Portland State University, an MS from the University of Florida, and a PhD from Florida State University.

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