|
Looking forward to 2023
Welcome to INSIGNIA-EU Newsletter 4! We aim to make these newsletters as informative as possible for stakeholders. Over the next few months, each of the laboratories that will be processing the INSIGNIA-EU samples will in turn contribute an insight into how their particular samples are being analysed, and tell us something about their laboratories and teams.
In most countries the beekeeping season is now drawing to a close, with honey extracted, and bee colonies now being prepared for the coming winter. Meanwhile, preparations are underway to find suitable citizen scientists and apiary locations for the INSIGNIA-EU sampling that will take place in each of the 27 EU countries during 2023. Each country has its own National Coordinator, whose responsibility is to recruit beekeeper citizen scientists, train them in the necessary techniques, supply them with all the equipment and materials they need, provide advice throughout the sampling period, and then supervise the collection of data and samples and ensure their safe transport to the relevant laboratories. Some of these National Coordinators are already members of the INSIGNIA-EU consortium, and all are either bee researchers or advisers for national beekeeping associations.
Bas Buddendorf and his colleagues from Wageningen Environmental Research, Netherlands, have now put together a detailed guideline for selecting and planning suitable apiary locations. The brief for the project is to obtain as even a distribution as possible of apiaries over the entire EU, but with sampling in each country, and if possible to provide equal coverage of different land uses and diversity. Since countries vary considerably in both size and distribution of land uses, this is inevitably a complex process.
It has been agreed that there will be a total of 315 sampling apiaries, with a minimum of five each in the smallest countries (Cyprus, Luxembourg and Malta), and then rising with country size to a maximum of 20 each in the largest countries (France, Germany, Poland and Spain). In order to obtain even coverage of land uses and land diversity, two detailed superimposed maps compatible with Google Earth Pro have been developed for each country using information from the CORINE database. The first shows land use, such as urban, agricultural, or forest or natural vegetation, and the second incorporates measures of landscape diversity (i.e. whether the area is entirely urban or agricultural, or a mixture of all three land use types).
The National Coordinator has then to either use the maps to plot theoretical ideal locations, and then try to find beekeepers with existing apiaries in these locations, or alternatively contact beekeepers willing to act as citizen scientists, and then using the maps identify which of their apiaries can provide the even coverage required. It is likely that a combination of these two approaches, with detailed discussion with the beekeepers will ultimately result in a suitable optimum location of apiaries.
Hopefully analysis of the many samples collected during the pilot studies of 2022 will be sufficiently complete for decisions to be made at the INSIGNIA-EU meeting to be held in Greece in November, as to a final combination of the best techniques to be used during the 2023 sampling. Training of the citizen scientists will then take place in time for the sampling to commence in the new beekeeping season. We will keep you informed about this process.
Please publicise the INSIGNIA-EU project as much as possible, and encourage your friends to sign up to our free newsletters on our website: https://www.insignia-bee.eu/ |
