Thanks for your comment, Randy. You were just in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, I believe.  Had we been better organized, we might have piggy-backed on those gigs, forked out a few bucks, and invited you north to Newfoundland.  Next time…  

One glance at the map will tell you that this is a very large province geographically. However, the human population is only about 530,000, and historically it has been the poorest province in confederation, since it joined in 1949.  There is significant out-migration with a large diaspora working in the Alberta Oil Sands and other parts of the country.  The provincial economy was hit hard by the drop in oil prices which hammered government revenues, with repercussions for the budget of our one and only university, Memorial.  We have two entomologists at this university, one whose research focus is primarily out-of-province.  There is one other PhD entomologist here but he works at a college with no official research program. Yolanda Wiersma (biology) at Memorial does Citizen Science work and has played a big role in setting up the NLNature.com website for volunteers to record their observations of various biota.  However there is nothing systematic about the traffic on this website, there are problems of species identification, gaping holes in the geographic coverage, and other issues.  Lastly, there is not a great history of environmentalism in this place, and many people have been hostile to “environmentalists” because of the seal hunt controversy.  The volunteer base is therefore small, it would appear.

In my humble opinion, to run a Citizen Science Bombus sp. inventory and monitoring program here we would need:

1. long-term institutional commitment from a university or government agency;
2. one or more entomologists and/or well-trained technicians who could do identification of species, committed long-term;
3. x number of dedicated Citizen Scientists who are committed to the program for multiple years. Ideally, they should be distributed across the “study area” in a statistically meaningful way (no sense having 20 people concentrated in one spot [redundant data]);
4. good training for the Citizen Scientists re. systematic use of pan traps, metadata recording, documentation of climatic variables at time of collection, etc.

I take Jerry Bromeshenk’s point that this kind of Citizen Science should be moderated by professional scientists.

I haven’t totally given up on the idea of running a Bombus-related Citizen Science project, but we’d need a careful assessment of the preceding four points before going any distance forward. I know I sound skeptical about the chances of getting something like this off the ground. We’ll see…  Our beekeeping association is about to circulate a list of research priorities to the national/international research community, and it includes the need for research related to Bombus distribution, abundance and health in the province.  We'll see if this bait gets any bites...

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html