Beescape is a web-based tool developed by Penn State University to help beekeepers, gardeners, urban planners, growers, researchers, and land managers assess the quality of their landscapes for supporting bees and other pollinators. Bees can fly up to 3 miles (5 kilometers) from their nest to find food, so Beescape provides an easy way for you to explore the landscapes surrounding your location.
After launching Beescape, you can select your location by letting the program automatically detect your current location, by entering your address, or by manually navigating to your location using the web interface.
To move the target icon, click on and hold the center point, and then drag the target. Once you have found your location, click on the icon (outside the center point) to drop it on the map.
Beescape will provide landscape quality scores for wild bee nesting habitat availability, levels of insecticide exposure, and seasonal (spring, summer, fall) forage quality. Scores are provided for the landscape surrounding your location at a 3 and 5 kilometer radius. These scores are compared to the average scores found in the north central United States, so you can determine if your landscape is low, medium, or high quality compared to the average for this region.
On the upper left corner of the map, there is a button you can use to change the background map features to show the roads, satellite, or agricultural crop view.
Beescape is a decision support tool centered around pollinator health. This tool uses GIS (Geographic Information Systems) to help predict the resources and threats that foraging bees encounter as they forage in a landscape. This tool is intended to help people learn how to improve their locations to support bees, or help beekeepers select better sites for their apiaries.
The data for the habitat quality scores is based on the Cropland Data Layer (CDL), which is generated by the US Department of Agriculture each year, using satellite images. The CDL predicts the types of crops or other habitats (such as forest) at a 30 m resolution.
The nesting index predicts the availability of nesting habitat for wild bees based on the habitats present. The forage index predicts the amount of flowering plants available in the spring, summer, and fall. The insecticide index summarizes the typical insecticide use patterns for different crops and estimates how toxic these are to bees.
Beescape was created by a team of researchers with pollinator, statistical and computational expertise. The Beescape tool combines ecological, meteorological, and GIS (Geographic Information System) data from several sources.
Beescape is led by researchers from Penn State’s Center for Pollinator Research, in collaboration with scientists at the USDA-Agricultural Research Service, University of Pittsburgh, Emory University, University of Minnesota, Dickinson College, University of California, Davis, University of Wisconsin, Madison,University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Purdue University and Azavea Corporation.
Current team members are shown below, and principal investigators are marked with a *.
Penn State University
Christina Grozinger*
Anthony Robinson*
Heather Grab
Darcy Gray
David McLaughlin
Gabriela Quinlan
Lily Houtman
USDA-ARS
Sarah Goslee*
Melanie Kammerer
University of Pittsburgh
Vikas Khanna*
Anais Ostroski
Emory University
Eric Lonsdorf*
Dickinson College
Maggie Douglas
Prestby, Timothy J et al. 2023. “Characterizing user needs for Beescape: A spatial decision support tool focused on pollinator health.” Journal of Environmental Management 325: 116416. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2022.116416.
Robinson, Anthony C et al. 2021. “Beescape: Characterizing user needs for environmental decision support in beekeeping.” Ecological Informatics 64: 101366. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2021.101366.
Kammerer, Melanie et al. 2021. “Wild Bees as Winners and Losers: Relative Impacts of Landscape Composition, Quality, and Climate.” Global Change Biology 27(6): 1250–65. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15485.
Calovi, Martina, Christina M Grozinger, Douglas A Miller, and Sarah C Goslee. 2021. “Summer Weather Conditions Influence Winter Survival of Honey Bees (Apis Mellifera) in the Northeastern United States.” Scientific Reports 11(1): 1553. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-81051-8.
Jordan, Alex, Harland M Patch, Christina M Grozinger, and Vikas Khanna. 2021. “Economic Dependence and Vulnerability of United States Agricultural Sector on Insect-Mediated Pollination Service.” Environmental Science & Technology 55(4): 2243–53. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.0c04786.
Sponsler, Douglas B, Don Shump, Rodney T Richardson, and Christina M Grozinger. 2020. “Characterizing the Floral Resources of a North American Metropolis Using a Honey Bee Foraging Assay.” Ecosphere 11(4): e03102. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.3102.
McNeil, Darin J et al. 2020. “Bumble Bees in Landscapes with Abundant Floral Resources Have Lower Pathogen Loads.” Scientific Reports 10(1): 22306. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-78119-2.
Kammerer, Melanie, John F. Tooker, and Christina M. Grozinger. "A long-term dataset on wild bee abundance in Mid-Atlantic United States." Scientific Data 7.1 (2020): 240. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-00577-0
Douglas, Margaret R, Douglas B Sponsler, Eric V Lonsdorf, and Christina M Grozinger. 2020. “County-Level Analysis Reveals a Rapidly Shifting Landscape of Insecticide Hazard to Honey Bees (Apis Mellifera) on US Farmland.” Scientific Reports 10(1): 797. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-57225-w.
Beescape is made possible by USDA-NIFA-AFRI (#2021-67021-34146), USDA-NIFA-AFRI (#2018-67013-27538), the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research (#549032) and the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (NSF DBI 16391 45).
