Planting for Pollinators

Generating recommendations for bumblebee-friendly gardening

Environmental concerns are often communicated to members of the public as series of complex threats that demand urgent action on multiple fronts. Here, we propose to use state-of-the-art digital technologies in online outreach aimed to encourage positive behaviour in the real world and through this engage members of the public with the key environmental issue of pollinator declines. We capitalise on people’s personal connection with their gardens and build further outreach capacity by linking up technologies piloted in a focussed online citizen science initiative (BeeWatch) with a wide hands-on UK nature outreach network (OPAL). Using photographic records of bumblebee species submitted by citizens, we offer tailored gardening advice aimed at providing flowering plants for a range of bumblebee species throughout the season (Funded by NERC).

Partners

• RHS
• BBCT
• BWARS
• University of Aberdeen

Advaith Siddharthan

Wibowo, A., Siddharthan, A., Anderson, H., Robinson, A., Sharma, N., Bostock, H., Salisbury, A., Comont, R. and Wal., R. (2017) Bumblebee Friendly Planting Recommendations with Citizen Science Data, Workshop: Workshop on Recommender Systems for Citizens at ACM RecSys, Como, Italy