Today, we celebrate World Bee Day by featuring the developing EU Pollinator Hub. The Hub is an unprecedented platform that centralises and processes data related to bees and pollination. It collects data from many different sources and transforms it into valuable and accessible information. Ultimately, the Hub will help us better assess the health of pollinators and their environments and create better strategies to tackle the challenges they face. The Hub has moved from the early stages of development and is now reaching a new level, closer to becoming an operational platform open to the public in 2024.
European values of union and cooperation inspire the Pollinator Hub. It works as a platform that allows the European community to work together to find common ways to gather, process, and sharedata on bees and pollination. As a result, people from different backgrounds and sectors relating to pollination and pollinator health will have a digital space that makes it easier toclean and process their data, share it with the community, and help create new common standards. The Pollinator Hub grows daily by seeking new members to join the data-sharing community and becomes stronger thanks to new collaborations.
BeeLife European Beekeeping Coordination develops the EU Pollinator Hub in collaboration with ZIP Solutions, -a Slovenian SME specialised in developing digital solutions related to bees and beekeeping-, Visualife -an Austrian data quality management expert- and CRA-Wallonie -Belgian agronomical research centre- dealing with data standardisation, validation, processing and visualisation. The Pollinator Hub counts on the support of an extensive network of stakeholders from the EU Bee Partnership, including beekeeping and farming associations, the plant protection productsindustry, bee scientists, environmental organisations, and veterinary associations and its development is made possible by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).
The Pollinator Hub is also becoming a space to provide advice on field data collection, curation and communication, allowing for the provision of data curation services, standardisation, visualisation and hosting. Platform developers are also building tools and standards to provide the opportunity to create tailor-made data reporting for data providers and users.
Pollinator Hub Functionality: Environmental data surrounding a chosen location
So let us honour bees and wild pollinators on their special day, celebrating them through our innovations to measure and tackle the environmental challenges we all face. Happy World Bee Day from the EU Pollinator Hub Team!
