Standardized, Walking Photo Survey

In order to address these goals, we are using a standardized survey protocol. A standardized survey aims to photograph bees for the same length of time, at the same time of day, in the same place, and under the same weather conditions repeatedly over months or years. Your standardized, biweekly photo surveys will document bee diversity and behavior. After you submit your observations to iNaturalist, we will identify the bees and plants in your photographs to see if bees behave differently in urban, suburban, and rural environments. For the details on our protocol, check out the Shutterbee Participant Guide! It has a wealth of information about the project, our experimental design, and support materials to make your participation as successful and meaningful as possible. We summarize the main parts of our protocol below and have created a cheatsheet to help, so you don't have to memorize it all.

1. ALL bee species! We will be monitoring all bee species to get a broad look at how bees respond to urbanization and conservation initiatives. For instance, do generalist species respond differently than specialists? Take a picture of the plant that the bee is on as well.

2. Walking surveys in YOUR yard: Biweekly, walking surveys along the same path in your yard will help us track bees over a broader spatial and temporal scale, providing more meaningful ecological information.

3. Conduct surveys between 10am and 3pm to maintain a consistent time of day across sites (yards). Insect activity varies through out the day, and we don't want that to bias our results.

4. Equivalent effort: ~30 minute surveys depending on the size of your yard or garden. However, life is complicated and weather is unpredictable, so keep track of your effort each time you do your survey. You may have to end early, or you may get distracted by the beautiful bees, lose track of time, and end late.

5. Consistent weather conditions. Insect activity can vary considerably depending on the weather, so we are asking everyone to do their surveys when it is at least partly sunny and warmer than 60°F.

6. Submit to iNaturalist with metadata: For each bee that you observe, submit an separate observation to iNaturalist. Check out our videos with detailed instructions under the Resources section on this page.

   1. Include multiple photographs of the bee (if you have them) and a photograph of the plant that the bee was foraging on.

   2. We also need metadata (data about data), so we know what your observations mean. For each bee that you observe, put the following in the "notes" or "description" (depending on the platform you are using) textbox: (A) our tag (Sbee), (B) your collection effort for the day, and (C) the plant species, if you know it. Each piece should be separated by a comma. For example: "Sbee, 30, clover"

7. While we hope this is a rare event, please fill out the "No Bees Form" if you do not observe any bees during your survey . Absences are important for us to know, but there is no good way to keep track of “zeros” in iNaturalist (which is biased towards presence records).