The EU Pollinator Hub, a new online platform designed to gather relevant information, knowledge and data on pollinator health and beekeeping, is planned to be operational by summer 2024.
Developed in a collaborative effort – under the guidance of the BeeLife European Beekeeping Coordination and supported by funding from EFSA, the European Food Safety Authority – it is part of the work that the European Union is carrying out to monitor pollinators’ health and target actions to protect them.
European and World biodiversity healthy environments and food security depend on animal pollination. Today, both managed and wild pollinators are endangered by many factors, including human activity and climate change effects. Intensive agriculture and land use, large-scale pesticides and herbicides use, urbanization and pollution, together with rising temperatures and extreme weather conditions, compromise floral reserves, bees primary source of nutrition. As a result, both pollinators’ and human’s lives are under threat.
This pollinator crisis requires a collaborative approach between European and national authorities, researchers, beekeepers and citizens, seeking solutions for a safer environment for pollinators. Work, research and efforts coming from many different stakeholders create and provide continuosly new data on relevant parameters, such as bee mortality, intoxication, parasites, land use and more.
However, all this data loses its full potential, since it hardly integrates nor harmonizes. The EU Pollinator Hub was created to respond to this need for sharing, comparing and combining data. The EU Pollinator Hub is a free to use online platform, open to everyone, designed in the collaborative spirit of open source. The platform has gone through various stages of development and is now close to becoming operational and accessible to the public. Its launch in the final version is scheduled for the summer of this year. The platform works on three levels of development: data acquisition, data integration and data visualization.
Data acquisition is possible when new data providers decide to share their data with the platform, while always retaining ownership. Data providers can be, among others, authorities, national or European projects, producers of hive or pollinator monitoring systems, farmers or beekeepers associations. Thus, the new data acquired are inserted into the platform database and integrated with those already available.
Finally, one of the main goals is make data viewable and ready for use, through interactive graphs and maps. Once made visually intuitive, the data becomes easily usable and accessible. By doing so, it becomes a lot easier to study and work on this data.
Starting from this data it will finally be possible to monitor the health conditions of pollinators from multiple points of view, inform future regulatory assessments and design new sustainable solutions.