Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration

The purpose of this research project is to investigate how rising temperatures, for instance climate change, can affect bees of various body sizes given their essential role in the global food supply through pollination of agricultural crops. To achieve this I utilized 3D imaging and 3D modeling techniques to calculate surface area-to-volume (SA/V) ratios of the bees that otherwise cannot be obtained using conventional methods. SA/V ratios were calculated for 4 different families (Halictidae, Colletidae, Apidae, and Megachilidae) in the order Hymenoptera and were analyzed alongside the bee’s Critical Thermal Maximum (CT Max) data, the maximum heat a bee can withstand before losing mobility, to gain insight on the bee's ability to survive in extreme hot temperatures. It is evident from the data that larger bees, characterized by smaller SA/V ratios, presented a higher CT Max suggesting their greater chance of survival in higher temperatures than smaller bees due to less heat exchange relative to their body size. This data implies that with the earth’s rising global temperatures larger bees will likely perform better than smaller bees. This poster was presented at the UCSB Center for Science & Engineering Partnerships Undergraduate Research Symposium, on August 9, 2023.

We are in the second year of a project to revitalize entomology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and have new updates of its impact on the campus to report. The UC Santa Barbara Natural History Collection (UCSB) at the Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration formed the UCSB Invertebrate Zoology collection from about 10K historical specimens that were found in a basement on the UCSB campus. The collection has continued to grow rapidly through Coastal California arthropod survey efforts, donated student collections, and faculty research projects. New results from the project include the formation of an outreach program through the UCSB Extension Department and discovery of several extirpated rare or endangered insects that once occurred on the UCSB campus. We will report on how the discovery of extirpated species on campus has received some press and the development of a collection on campus has raised the profile of entomology and insect conservation in the area.

This poster was presented at the 2018 Entomological Collections Network meeting held in Vancouver, Canada on November 10-11. 

This poster was presented at the 2024 UCSB EEMB Research symposium.

It has been well studied that light pollution significantly impacts humans and wildlife. When light is in excess, humans are negatively affected through reduced safety from light glare, disrupted circadian rhythms, and decreased exposure to the night sky. We studied UCSB’s residential areas to determine if these were issues on campus. This research was conducted through community engagement surveys about problematic lights and field visits to measure light intensity and color.  We found a consensus among respondents that particularly bright or cold colored lights regularly affect respondent’s ability to sleep and thus their academic performance. Surveys were promoted through 10 versions of attention-grabbing info flyers posted around campus, displayed on digital screens in residential lobbies, and sent out through residential email list servers to make our resources available in numerous forms with 9 responses and the anticipation of more in the spring quarter. We evaluated whether there are problematic lights around 12 residential halls through field surveys. After identifying 40 problematic lights, we identified a number of possible solutions that included adding shields, decreasing light color temperature, or changing the lighting fixture and/or bulb. We also took readings of sky glow into the atmosphere across 4 residential zones and 2 campus adjacent natural area zones to assess whether the school is dark sky compliant. We hope to assess the benefits of reducing night lighting on the school’s energy budget. Overall, we hope to improve campus lighting to benefit students’ safety, reduce light pollution impact on the night sky, and improve the school’s energy budget

Wing venation characteristics are fundamental for defining and classifying insects. In bees these characteristics are relatively conserved, but the patterns between groups remain poorly understood. We employed geometric morphometrics to assess variation in wing venation across bees taxa. Geometric morphometrics allows for detailed shape analysis of wing structure, which may provide insights into evolutionary relationships. By digitally landmarking homologous wing vein characters of a diverse sample of bees, we quantified and compared phenotypic variation in order to assess whether the resulting morphological clusters reflect evolutionary divergence and align with established phylogeny. This study assesses the potential of geometric morphometrics to infer the phylogenetic placement of indeterminate bee species based solely on wing vein patterns and provides an effective pathway for species identification.

Presented at the UCSB EEMB Undergraduate Research Symposium 2024

The distribution of bees can be estimated, in part, by enviromental variables associated with geography. Using bee occurrence records, we quantified the estimated species richness of the EPA level 3 defined ecoregions using coverage-based rarefaction. Our study reveals that bee species richness is highest in ecoregions with warm dry summers. Furthermore, increased species richness was found to be correlated with maximum mean temperature.

Presented at the iDigBio 6th Annual Digital Data in Biodiversity Research Conference on 05/24/2022 and the University of California Santa Barbara EEMB Undergraduate Research Symposium on 04/23/2022

What time of year are bees flying, where are they flying, and how do biogeographical factors, sex, and native status affect flight phenology? Consistent monitoring along with creating spatially and temporally explicit visualizations using large openly available data sets enhance our understanding of trends in flight time phenology and shape our understanding of bee-plant interactions, including shifts in the phenology of bee pollinators.

Species occurrence data from digitized collection networks (iNaturalist, Global Biodiversity Information Faculty (GBIF), Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio), Symbiota Collections of Arthropods Network (SCAN), and UC Santa Barbara Collection Network) are part of an effort to improve our understanding of bees in coastal Santa Barbara County, including the California Channel Islands. New inventory collections combined with historical data from over 11 natural history museums and 2 observation networks are used in an effort to examine patterns and changes in phenology of native and non-native bee species, and create updated species inventories.

Synthesizing species observation data from digitized natural history collections makes use of a wealth of existing data and multiplies the analytical power of isolated observations, but it is not without limitations and challenges. By exploring novel techniques to generate clear and accurate visualizations to communicate bee flight time, we present our key initial findings and identify geographic, temporal, and taxonomic gaps, which will lead to further focused inventory projects of coastal Santa Barbara County, improved data quality for phenological analyses, and reusable methods for visualizing insect phenology data across taxa or geography. 

This poster was presented at the 2024 UCSB EEMB Research symposium.

Aquatic macroinvertebrates are critical indicators of ecological health because of their role as primary consumers, supporting many species within their respective food chains. Birds, as key components of wetland ecosystems, heavily rely on these aquatic macroinvertebrates as a food source. Understanding the dynamics between aquatic macroinvertebrates and environmental factors is crucial for effective ecosystem management efforts. This study compares surface sampling data and benthic dipnetting sampling data across multiple sites within North Campus Open Space (NCOS) from the summer of 2023 to the spring of 2024. 

Our research aims to determine the species abundance and diversity of key aquatic invertebrates and zooplankton using the Shannon–Wiener diversity index. By utilizing two distinct sampling methods, we investigate the effectiveness of the sampling techniques through potential variations in species abundance. Moreover, we correlate this data with water quality parameters such as pH, salinity, and dissolved oxygen to assess their influence on the distribution and abundance of aquatic macroinvertebrates. Overall, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of the intricate relationships between environmental variables and aquatic macroinvertebrate abundance across two different sampling mediums.

Large, open-access biological datasets, like those hosted by Global Biotic Interactions (GloBI), have become increasingly accessible due to greater data collection, compilation, and storage. These databases serve to better inform our understanding of species occurrences, interactions, and ecosystem structure, broadly. In this work, we leverage GloBI data to better understand patterns of pollination, a biologically and economically essential biotic interaction between plants and pollinators. Specifically, we sought to develop a better understanding of bee specialization of pollen, an evolutionary trait in bees that underscores the stability and structure of pollinator interaction networks. We compared GloBI and expert-compiled data to better understand patterns in resource specialization.

Through our exploration of GloBI, we found several sources of bias, including the limitations of community data collection and scarcity of rare bees. We found a strong positive correlation between the number of sources (i.e. literature, natural history collection) citing the interactions of a bee species and the number of plant families visited by that same bee species. We also found that while the expert classification of bee specialists visit fewer plant families than other bees in the GloBI dataset, there are clusters of species that diverge from the expected trend. These findings indicate that observer bias, on a global scale, can skew our definition of resource specialization or generalization. Moreover, large, open-access datasets like GloBI can change our previous understanding of biological interactions and systems by accessing novel data sources and aggregation.

This poster was presented during the LB 40: "Vital Connections in Ecology: Breakthroughs in Understanding Species Interactions 2" Thursday, August 5, 2021, Ecological Society of America Meeting, Virtual, 2021

The Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration (CCBER) has formed an insect collection from 10,000 historical specimens that were rediscovered in a basement on the UCSB campus and a little funding. Since its discovery, the UCSB collection has grown rapidly through Coastal California arthropod survey efforts, donated student collections, and faculty research projects. These surveys, conducted by the Cheadle Center for conservation and restoration monitoring, are hugely valuable as the coastal regions of Santa Barbara and Ventura County are critically endangered habitats, with over 95% of these areas lost to human disturbance.

Bees are important pollinators. However, their numbers and diversity are in decline which poses a serious threat to plant pollination and affects food production. The Big-Bee project (http://big-bee.net) launched in 2021 to research bee ecology and taxonomy through the digitalization of bee specimens. Bees’ ocelli are important navigational organs that receive and evaluate light intensities. The project aims at exploring the impact of bees’ sociality on potential variation in ocelli morphology. By measuring median ocellar width between sexes, I firstly tested whether sexual size dimorphism occurs in ocelli between sexes in the same bee species. Then, I evaluated whether the sexual size dimorphism exists based on social versus solitary bees. The results indicated the existence of a different median ocellar size between males and females within one species. However, such existence does not occur in males and females based on sociality categorization, indicating the sociality might not be a driver in causing the dimorphism. This poster was presented at UC Santa Barbara Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities Poster Colloquim on May 3rd, 2022.