Database and digitization of bees in Thailand

Data Records

The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 11,461 records.

1 extension data tables also exist. An extension record supplies extra information about a core record. The number of records in each extension data table is illustrated below.

This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.

Versions

The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.

How to cite

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

Nalinrachatakan P, Chatthanabun N, Thanoosing C, Warrit N (2025). Database and digitization of bees in Thailand. Version 1.26. Chulalongkorn University, Department of Biology. Occurrence dataset. https://cloud.gbif.org/asia/resource?r=bsruthaibee&v=1.26

Rights

Researchers should respect the following rights statement:

The publisher and rights holder of this work is Chulalongkorn University, Department of Biology. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC-BY-NC 4.0) License.

GBIF Registration

This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: cb0ab16c-7589-4a44-80d0-30bae8c952ef.  Chulalongkorn University, Department of Biology publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by Participant Node Managers Committee.

Keywords

Occurrence; Specimen

Contacts

Geographic Coverage

Thailand

Taxonomic Coverage

All bees (Apoidea: Anthophila) specimens collecting in Thailand were identified to their lowest taxonomic rank possible.

Temporal Coverage

Project Data

Bees from Southeast Asia are poorly represented in public species occurrence databases like GBIF. The Chulalongkorn University Natural History Museum (CUNHM) in Thailand holds a collection of more than 12,000 bee specimens, of which at least 6,700 have digital records that are available. The specimens include bees from four families across more than 500 localities in each of the country's 77 provinces. The purpose of this project is to mobilize at least 8,000 Thai bee specimen records deposited at CUNHM and publish them to GBIF. Activities will include photographing specimens, assigning QR codes, transcribing labels, formatting transcription of the data to enable publication in GBIF.org, mapping species distributions, and holding a workshop to showcase and demonstrate the use of the database. For long-term sustainability of the project, we aim to establish an accurate and reliable digital bee database for the global audience and researchers whose interest are in pollination biology, conservation, bee taxonomy, and biodiversity informatics in Southeast Asia, a lesser-known area of bee diversity. Research fields in climate change, invasive species, and ecology of pollinators will benefit from this work, since information from tropical Asia is often limited and sometimes inaccessible. Beside producing and publishing the database to GBIF, this effort can provide a template for hosting other biodiversity information hosted and stored in Thailand by the National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA), a partner that is providing matching funds. The processes and methods of digitization of bee records will be disseminated and shared with the country's other research collections, universities, and institutions through workshop and university lectures. Through these outreach activities, we hope to familiarize and educate audiences on how to utilize the data efficiently—both through the database and GBIF—and to persuade them the importance of pollinators to the public.

The personnel involved in the project:

Sampling Methods

Most of bees in CUNHM collection were preserved as dry specimens, as a results of field collection using aerial net. Some specimens were collected by other insect collecting methods (e.g. blue-vane trap, malaise trap).

Method step description:

1. In order to obtain information from specimens, the processes can be divided into two steps. First, specimens identification: all bees specimens were identified under stereomicroscopes by our resident bee taxonomists. The identification were carefully made to the lowest taxonomic rank as possible and also compare to the credited references such as research publications (mostly to seek out the revision or the original descriptions), webtools (e.g. Discoverlife, iNaturalist, buggide, idtools, and GBIF), and museum data portal such as data.nhm.ac.uk for type specimens examinations. Second,: the original label records were extracted by our technical staff and initially placed into spreadsheet, especially for old and damaged labels with obscure handwriting records (all label photos were digitized as backup). The extracted data were then filled out on their relevance DwC terms in the spreadsheet. This spreadsheet will be used for data validation, especially for spelling and locality information, which were later subjected to data cleaning using Microsoft Excel 2019 and OpenRefine v.3.4.
2. For the photo digitization processes, four standard microphotograph were produced: the original label, face, dorsal, and lateral habitus. Most of the specimens digitization were made on Canon 7D markII mounted on the Zeiss Stemi 508 stereomicroscope, whereas others were conducted on other configurations but in similar concept.

Collection Data

Additional Metadata