Cornell_Guzman

The goal of our research is to help improve insect conservation by developing statistical methods that better use all available data. While the distribution of some species is changing, it is actually very difficult to make reliable inferences as to which species are declining and by how much from the often messy and complex historical and spatial datasets that is available — for example, historical museum records, where species occurrences are aggregated from studies with different sampling procedures. For many insects, this is the only type of data we have. In order to address this gap, our research focuses on determining if and how statistical models can be applied to historical records without yielding biased trends. We apply these statistical models to determine how the distribution of pollinators has changed through time. We also determine which drivers (e.g. pesticide use, climate change, land use change, etc.) are causing the most decline of the most pollinator species in different regions of North America, and translate these insights to potential insect conservation solutions. https://edslab.org/