July 27, 2021

Expanding Flower-Visiting Wasps Project

Hi iNaturalist wasp community!

This project has provided great insight into the association/interaction between wasps and flowers in North America (Canada & US). Indeed, this project has grabbed the attention of UK based project - Big Wasp Survey (BWS) – as it aligns with their existing citizen science project to study wasps as pollinators.

Pollination is just one of the many useful ecosystem services wasps provide. But we don’t know much about which flowers benefit from wasp pollination, or which wasps are most important as pollinators. So, working with the BWS team we are aiming to expand the geographical scope of this project to global observations, to discover more wasp-flower interactions/associations.

The name of the project will change (to Flower Visiting Wasps of the World) to accommodate global observations, but don’t worry other requirements will not. We’re interested in any wasps that you may find visiting flowers: parasitoids, solitary and social. The observation field “Name of associated plant” is required, and note that macrophotography may make it hard to identify the plant species. Please make sure to include the full wasp and flower in the picture.

All observations that have been added previously to the project will remain. Project members will now be able to add their own observations outside of North America (Canada & US), as well as adding other iNaturalist members’ observations.

We hope that you will join us on this journey to identify wasp-flower interactions/associations around the world, helping us study wasps as pollinators.

Please feel free to share this journal post and project so that we can reach a wider community.

More information on Big Wasp Survey:
Website: https://www.bigwaspsurvey.org/
BWS Twitter: @bigwaspsurvey
Email: info@bigwaspsurvey.org

Posted on July 27, 2021 09:54 AM by seirian seirian | 10 comments | Leave a comment

Archives