Monthly Meeting: Dr. Hollis Woodard

Adventures in US Bee Conservation

Hollis is an Associate Professor of Entomology at the University of California, Riverside and PI of the US National Native Bee Monitoring Research Coordination Network. She received a PhD in Biology in 2012 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she worked with Dr. Gene Robinson on the molecular basis of social evolution in bees. From 2013-2015 she was a USDA-NIFA Postdoctoral Fellow working on the nutritional ecology of bumble bees with Dr. Shalene Jha at the University of Texas at Austin. In summer 2015, she joined the faculty at the University of California, Riverside. She is broadly interested in native bee ecology, evolution, social behavior, and conservation, and is leading national efforts to conserve US wild bees.

Bee conservation in the US is currently hindered by challenges associated with assessing the status and trends of a diverse group of >3000 species, many of which are rare, endemic to small areas, and/or exhibit high inter-annual variationin population size. Fundamental information about the distribution of most species across space and time, thus, is lacking yet urgently needed to assess population status, guide conservation plans, and prioritize actions among species and geographies.