The Relationship Between Air Quality and Bee Diversity within New York

Group Members: Stefan Tan, Joel James, Melissa Mojum, Zobia Jamal

For our poster, we explored whether there’s a relationship between air quality and bee diversity within New York state. We know how air quality affects us from the human point of view but we don’t consider the effect it has on smaller organisms, such as bees. With the increase in air pollution in recent years, the air quality index(AQI) will likely worsen. Although it may seem like we won’t be affected by the loss of bee diversity, bees provide us with many ecosystem services, such as honey and flower pollination.

In our study, we used the iNaturalist database to gather bee species observation data and used the EPA directory to retrieve daily air quality data from the 28 counties available. We decided to focus on those counties and assumed they provided a variety of air quality values. After that we used the number of bee species we retrieved from iNaturalist to represent bee diversity. We averaged the air quality data from the past year and graphed it in relation to the number of bee species to determine if a relationship between these two variables is present. To filter misleading data, we utilized data from counties with at least 100 observers.

From our first examination, we determined that there was an extremely weak direct relationship between the AQI and the number of bee species. After setting the arbitrary cutoff at 100 observers for each county, there was now a weak indirect relationship between the AQI and the number of bee species.

In the first examination, we were able to see a very weak relationship between the air quality index and the number of bees, in which we were not able to conclude much from it. However, most counties have very few observers, and as a result have a low amount of recorded bee species, which skews our data. Creating the 100 observers cutoff allowed us to determine a slightly stronger indirect relationship between the AQI and the number of bee species. As a higher AQI means worse air quality, we can see there is an association between good air quality and a larger number of bee species.

If we were to continue this work, we could use another database that contains all the bee species recorded in a particular county, or, we could choose to work with a completely different region and use the same database to compare the correlation between air quality and bee diversity.