Biodiversity Informatics in Action: Identification and Monitoring of Bee Species using ABIS

Bees, as the main pollinators of food crops, represent a critical natural resource which needs to be carefully exploited and managed. In recent years, however, destruction of bee's native habitats, infestations, and displacements of native bees by alien bee species have reduced and disturbed bee populations and this is already having considerable impact on global agriculture. A further concurrent problem is that there are probably fewer than 50 taxonomic experts worldwide able to identify bee species. ABIS (Automatic Bee Identification System) is a suite of software tools created for the identification and monitoring of bees. Bee species are rapidly and reliably determined from images of the bees’ wings by means of linear and non-linear statistics in conjunction with image processing. Work is currently in progress to couple the bee identification tools within a geographic information system and to make a bee recognition service available over the Internet.