Honey, I’m home!
Honeybee colonies have experienced substantial losses attributed to a combination of factors including diseases, parasites, poor nutrition, reduced habitat, and pesticide exposure. The magnitude of these losses on a national scale continue to exceed what beekeepers consider to be economically sustainable. In addition to declines in honey bee health, other iconic species including the monarch butterfly, have also declined due to similar factors and climate change.
To help the scientists at the EPA better understand the health of honey bees and monarch butterflies on a large geographic scale, we need your help to create a mobile application that can be used by you and other citizen scientists. You are able to choose whether you would like this application to focus on honey bees or monarch butterflies. If a user sees a honey bee or monarch butterfly, the application would allow the user to upload a photo of the species and the flower on which it is foraging with a timestamp and location data. User data will be merged with existing research.
Additional features of the application may allow the user to:
- See a map of where and when other users snapped a photograph of a bee/butterfly and its food source
- Identify the plant that the honeybee or monarch butterfly was feeding
- Provide the user with the option to use the highest resolution available on the phone to take the photo
- “Level up” by earning points for the number of uploads. Who wouldn’t want a Honeybee or Butterfly Badge and the opportunity to contribute toward advancing our understanding of these species?
