Insect pollinators provide fundamental ecosystem services to wild plants and commercial crops, promoting the transfer of pollen between flowers and across plants. Bees are some of the most important pollinators worldwide [1]: their biology and ecology are well known, and some species like Apis mellifera and Bombus terrestris are used commercially to foster the pollination of a wide range of crops, from open field oil seed rape to soft fruit in polytunnel or greenhouse setups. However, for many crops, we still lack details on how pollinators interact with flowers, as it is challenging to carefully record all pollinator-flower interactions, in particular when this is done in person by human observers. For this reason, the development of approaches for remote monitoring is a field that has received much attention in the recent past [2, 3] and has the potential to undergo a significant development in the near future. In this project, the student will make use of both camera and acoustic monitoring to carefully record all pollinator-flower interactions, as well as the levels of colony activity when bees are foraging. This large set of data will be processed with the support of machine learning tools developed by members of the supervisory team (Strathclyde and JHI) to identify how colony traffic affects flower visitation rates, and how these two measures link to successful fruit set and harvest. These experiments will be performed in both open fields and glasshouse/polytunnel setups available in the partner institution (JHI), targeting a range of pollinator species and suitable crops. The student will receive key training in a broad range of disciplines, from behavioural ecology and physiology of insects (Aberdeen), to bioacoustics [4], image analyses [5], and machine learning methods to process these data (Strathclyde, JHI and AgriSound).

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[1] Mateos‐Fierro, Zeus, Michael PD Garratt, Michelle T. Fountain, Kate Ashbrook, and Duncan B. Westbury. "Wild bees are less abundant but show better pollination behaviour for sweet cherry than managed pollinators." Journal of Applied Entomology 146, no. 4 (2022): 361-371.

 

[2] Naqvi, Qaim, Patrick J. Wolff, Brenda Molano‐Flores, and Jinelle H. Sperry. "Camera traps are an effective tool for monitoring insect–plant interactions." Ecology and Evolution 12, no. 6 (2022): e8962.

 

[3] Miller-Struttmann, Nicole E., David Heise, Johannes Schul, Jennifer C. Geib, and Candace Galen. "Flight of the bumble bee: Buzzes predict pollination services." PloS one 12, no. 6 (2017): e0179273.

 

[4] Cosentino, Mel, Francesco Guarato, Jakob Tougaard, David Nairn, Joseph C. Jackson, and James FC Windmill. "Porpoise click classifier (PorCC): A high-accuracy classifier to study harbour porpoises (Phocoena phocoena) in the wild." The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 145, no. 6 (2019): 3427-3434.

 

[5] Williams, Dominic, Alison Karley, Avril Britten, Susan McCallum, and Julie Graham. "Raspberry plant stress detection using hyperspectral imaging." Plant Direct 7, no. 3 (2023): e490.