Distribution of Plant-Pollinator Interactions

In 2022, I received a Northwest Climate Adaptation Science Center fellowship to examine how climate change is likely to influence the distribution of bumble bees, their host plants, and the interactions between these two guilds. For this fellowship, I built species distribution models for two bumble bees designated Species of Greatest Conservation Need by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife—Bombus morrisoni and Bombus occidentalis—using data collected for the Pacific Northwest Bumble Bee Atlas.

In an ongoing extension of this project, I am evaluating how models that independently estimate plants’ and pollinators’ spatial distributions perform in predicting where interactions between specific plant and pollinator species occur.