Timothy Judd
Southeast Missouri State University, MO·Ecology & Evolution
Bees are the most important pollinators of both crops and wild plants, and there is growing concern that their numbers and diversity are falling. Yet only a fraction of the roughly 4,000 bee species in the United States have enough data to tell where they live or whether they are present in an ecosystem.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Biology
- Topics
bees
pollinators
pollinator decline
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Nov 2026
What they work on
- Digitize label data from bee specimens in US insect collections into a shared global database, aiming for at least 350,000 specimen records and 6,600 high-resolution image sets.
- Use the digitized records to map distributions for thousands of US bee species, quantify bee biodiversity patterns, and find data gaps to guide future monitoring.
- Use historical specimen records to track changes in bee species ranges over time and document climate impacts, highlighting key species and regions for conservation.
More about the research
Much of that missing information already exists on the labels of bee specimens stored in museum and university insect collections. It is just not in digital form.
Why it matters
Digitized bee records could help researchers, conservationists and government agencies spot bee declines and track how bees respond to climate change. They could also help identify which species and places most need protection. The open data may help farmers, cities and land managers choose pollinator restoration options for agricultural, urban and other managed landscapes.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Brian Scholtens
College of Charleston, SC·Ecology & Evolution
Photograph and database all ~30,000 specimens in the Richard Dominick Lepidoptera collection from South Carolina's Santee Delta, collected 1965–1976, and make the data publicly available.
Erin Manzitto-Tripp
University of Colorado Boulder, CO·Ecology & Evolution
Digitize 3 million Asian vascular plant specimens from US herbaria, with a focus on Southeast Asian and Himalaya-Hengduan biodiversity hotspots.
Eric Tepe
University of Cincinnati, OH·Plant Science & Agriculture
Relocate the roughly 118,500-specimen Margaret H. Fulford Herbarium into a renovated facility with a compactor system and modern cabinets, replacing storage damaged by repeated water leaks and flooding.
The school
Southeast Missouri State University: 1 labs on PI Pages.
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