 Yeah, so I'm Josh Campbell. So I do work for the USDA Agricultural Research Service over in Sydney. So I'm sorry I couldn't be there today due to the the weather and potential issues with traveling, but I'm going to talk to you today about Energy development on pollinating insects. So this might be a little bit different presentation than you've had previously and so when we talk about pollinators, I I'm mostly talking about native bees The top three photos are native bees that you may find in North Dakota, Montana, elsewhere, as opposed to the non-native honeybee that's the photo at the bottom and So I have a number of projects that I have worked on that are related to energy development and looking at the impacts on pollinators Yeah, so why are we interested in pollinators? So about three-quarters of all flowering plants that we know of are dependent on some sort of animal pollination Which is largely done by some type of insect mostly bees. If you go to the grocery store almost all of the fruits, vegetables, nuts that you see are dependent on pollinators to set seed and or fruit and in this and in this part of the the country the Northern Great Plains if You have a diverse pollinator community. You have a diverse plant community and and you have a healthy rangeland So bees are considered the most important and prolific pollinators and Worldwide there are about 20,000 species of what we would term native bees There's about 4,000 in the US and I just put this into comparison to the honeybee in which in the United States we have one species of a honeybee it is non-native it originated in Asia and Was brought over about to the United States about 400 years ago And so you can see in the top right picture. This is just a kind of a collage of Different types of native bees. They can be very large like bumblebee size to very tiny and When you look at native bees as opposed to the honeybee the majority of them nest in the ground So most of them actually dig their own hole or entrance to their their nest and then The other third roughly 30% of native bees instead of nesting in the ground they nest in dead rotten wood or the piffs of Steams and the majority of native bees are solitary as opposed to the honeybee which forms large colonies now Although native bees and the honeybee are considered the most important pollinators There are a lot of other insects out there that also act as pollinators And I'm just going to highlight a few this is kind of a hot topic in entomology These days is looking at non bee pollinators simply because we don't know a lot about them This is just some random photos of some of the more common non bee pollinators, so Top left would be types of dipterans types of flies so like hover flies bee flies Bottom left are types of wasp wasp can actually pollinate a lot of Plants that we know and then of course on the right side You've got butterflies and moths and then at the bottom right lots of beetles can actually act as pollinators unfortunately It's not all good news when you're looking at pollinators What we're kind of seeing and this is kind of global is that pollinators are declining in abundance They're there a lot of their ranges are start are becoming highly reduced And even when you look at just the northern Great Plains We know very little about especially about native pollinator communities And I like to give an example of the bumblebee. That's the middle photo there That's the rusty patch bumblebee just to give you an idea about how some of the declines that we're seeing and this is This is an exaggerated case, but that particular bumblebee was extremely common about 20 25 years ago And now its range and numbers have been reduced by about 99 percent Scary part of that is we actually have no idea why it has Shrunk in range and population We know that there's a lot of stressors out there for not just native pollinators, but honeybees as well And these can include things like habitat fragmentation various agricultural practices like the spraying of pesticides Exotic plants and other species that have invaded our landscape can can play a negative role So I'm going to talk about a few projects that I have worked on that dealt with pollinators and energy development Mostly what I'm talking about energy development I'm talking about the conversion of land for energy development And so I'm going to show you three different projects that I've worked on one involves the removal of non-native grasses and So it's a prairie restoration project and then we planted native grasses and native forbs And I'll show you the impacts it had on pollinators and this is analogous to what happens along after they put in pipelines The second project I'll quickly talk about is looking at biofuel grasses that were grown in Mississippi And the third thing that's more of a recent project is looking at So the building of solar facilities in the Mojave Desert of California and its impact own pollinators And so first project that I'll quickly go over and I'm not going to give you a lot of details on this But what does call this a prairie restoration project this this was done it over in near Sydney, Montana and so we had a rancher who was interested in getting rid of Non-native crested wheat grass and he had Pastures that were basically a monoculture of it and so We divided this pasture up into different plots and applied different types of herbicide treatments and mostly the herbicide treatments were either Two times or three times the label rate of glyphosate The reason we did not use the label rate of glyphosate is that it is well known that it will not Be effective against crested wheat grass and if you're interested in the the plants that we planted I put them down at the bottom middle Part of this screen. I'm not going to read them to you And so here's just a quick photo of kind of how the plots were laid out and what the surrounding Landscape looked like before they removed the cattle off these plots and so my goal was to look at pollinators and How they are impacted by this prairie restoration and so I monitored for this project I monitored Pollinating insects in two two manners. I did sweep net surveys in which I Collected insects that were actively visiting flowering plants and then I use something called an emergence trap And that's your bottom Right photo and so it looks like a small little white tint there. There is not a bottom to it And so basically if you remember from earlier that most of your native bees nest in the ground And so we put these tents over a section of ground and then whatever Emerges from the ground flies upwards and gets collected in that Collecting cup that you can kind of see on the top and so just a quick time line The herbicide treatments were put in in 2020 and then I started monitoring pollinators Shortly after the herbicide treatments were put in in 2020 and the following year in 2021 and I'm going to show I'm going to show you a a series of Bar graphs that kind of show you what we found and so what you're looking at here is From our emergence traps and so What and so what you see is that in the herbicide plots whether it's two times or three times We had increased native bee nesting or ground nesting bees that were actively using our plots And so this was kind of exciting when when the in the areas where crested wheatgrass was still very Prevalent it really clogged the landscape and didn't allow for much if any Bear ground which is what a lot of native bees are targeting for their to bit to dig their nest The second graph I'm going to show you are the foraging native bees And so these and so this is from our sweep net data and so again that the herbicide plots had One they had increased flowers They also had increased native bee foraging And if you're a hunt if you're a honey bee person, this is good news as well We also saw a dramatic increase in honey bees utilizing the the herbicide plots and so Conclusion of this study is that we had increased native bee and honey bee foraging in the herbicide plots We had increased ground nesting bees utilizing the herbicide plots and most of this was due to an increase in floral resources and Bear ground in the herbicide plots and the interesting thing for me with this project is that all the graphs are Plots that are that I showed you Were basically combined over the two-year project, but those results were almost instantaneous. So within a month month and a half We were seeing an immediate impact of the prairie restoration own Native bees and honey bees Okay, the second project that deals with Energy formation is where I did a project over in Mississippi looking at biofuels specifically cellulosic biofuels And or that these grasses they were grasses, but they could also be used for livestock forage And I'll explain that in a minute all of this work took place in what is termed the black belt of the south or in Mississippi they call it the black prairie and kind of you can see that on the map They caught you don't think of the southeast as a as a prairie habitat But there is a section of the southeast that is called the black belt region in which historically it was native warm-season prairie grasses They call it the black belt because the soil is extremely organic rich and has a very dark color to it The majority of this prairie has been destroyed Mostly for agricultural reasons And so with this project we were looking at converting basically old cornfields into Cellulosic grass fields that could be used for biofuels and or livestock forage and so we had multiple treatments We had monocultures of a non native grass Bermuda grass, which is very commonly grown in the southeast We had monocultures of a native grass called Indian grass then we had native grass mixtures And with these treatments we put cattle on most of them and the idea for cattle even though it's not energy related in order to To give incentives for people to switch from corn to some of these biofuel crops As we're trying to see if there's multiple uses that that you can get out of the land Can you harvest biofuels and actually? Graze livestock and So these riveting photos that I'm showing you I just I just want to impress upon you that you know We had a cornfield the cornfield was completely removed Everything was plowed over and basically we started with bare dirt So I'm just basically showing you that we started at you know ground zero So bare dirt and then we seeded these these plots and then the two photos on the right are a couple of the What the plots looked like After the grasses had grown and so for this particular project I used instead of using like the previous project where I use sweep nets and emergence traps I used a passive trapping mechanism for pollinating insects and these are just simply term colored bowl or pan traps and As the name implies it's a it's basically a plastic Colored bowl usually people use yellow white and or blue these are supposed to Somewhat mimic a flower and so if a pollinator is flying within in the nearby area It will land into the ball which has soapy water the soap basically breaks surface tension and The the pollinator will drown in the soapy water and then you can get relative abundances of the insects Okay, so I'm just reminding you that native bees primarily nest in the ground and For this project we saw kind of two main groups of native bees the two photos on your left or two types of smaller sweat Bees and the two Photos on your right are larger bees about the size of a honeybee or so and we Collectively call those digger bees digger bees meaning they're really good at digging into the ground the middle Schematic photo just shows you a schematic what would a very schematic be nest might look like and so when you see a native bee land On a flower it's collecting pollen and nectar the female brings that pollen nectar back to a nest It forms a little pollen ball when the pollen ball gets big enough It lays an egg on it the egg hatches the larvae consumes the pollen and the bee goes through a developmental stage until an adult And in the process starts over and so keep in mind We're gonna I'm gonna quickly show you a couple of graphs about the sweat bees and the digger bees and so We did this project for two years 2011 2012 so in the early spring of 2011 that's when the grasses were seeded into onto the bare ground And so what you're looking at here is the most common genus Lassia glossum of sweat bees that were collected and so What we saw was that generally the native grass mixtures Harbored more sweat bees more ground nesting sweat bees But what you see from this graph is that that held true in 2011, but by 2012 Everything goes flat line for the sweat bees so that the numbers drop and we don't see any kind of significant results Compared to the different types of grasses So I thought those was interesting and I I didn't make a lot of sense of it until and I want you to Keep this graph in your head and when I go to the next one What you're looking at here are the digger bees the 2011 2012 so 2011 we didn't see any treatment effects We fairly low numbers But in 2012 you can see that we get a big jump in the number of digger bees that we're seeing and once again these native grass mixtures start taking off as far as What was utilizing these fields so it's almost a complete opposite of the smaller sweat bees And so what I what I think is going on or what has gone on is that the smaller sweat bees were kind of the early colonizers they came into the the bare Patches in these fields created a lot of ground nests But by the second year these larger ground nesting bees come in and start out competing the smaller sweat bees for nest sites Okay, so I've talked about a Prairie restoration project, which is analogous to natural gas and oil pipelines talked about cellulosic biofuels that were grown in Mississippi and so the last project that I'll just quickly share with you is Looking at the development of solar facilities and The impacts it has on pollinators and all of this work was done in the Mojave Desert in California It was done on the Ivan Pah solar facility, which is one of the largest solar facilities in the world And so and the bottom right picture is a is a an actual photo of the Ivan Pah part of the Ivan Pah solar facility And so for this project I used a different type of trap so in previous projects we talked about Sweet netting emergence traps colored bowl traps and in this project I used what is known as a vein trap and that's the photo on the left That photo was not taken in the desert, but that was from another project that I worked on so a little more green as opposed to the desert but the the vein trap is this yellow and blue container Put a little soapy water in it Insects hit the the blue veins and then they fall into the collecting container So it's a it's just another technique that pollinator ecologists will utilize to to collect native bees and other pollinators on this facility They were exploring the different ways of actually putting in the mirrors and so This is this is showing you that the three treatments that were used One is called a bladed treatment and that's the the top left and then again This is after the treatments had been put in these photos are and so for the bladed project What they did is they came with a v plow and basically plowed everything up. So you're looking at soil disruption You know below ground and above ground And all of these treatments are designed to one Get rid of a lot of vegetation second treatment that they that they explored with was simply mowing and they would put their Their mower blades at about 14 15 inches high and then basically chop everything off at that level These the third type of treatment they did was what they termed a halo and so within the solar facility they would Make these little concentric circles with you know in and around the mirrors where they Actually didn't do any type of vegetation prep and then of course from a scientist standpoint We went outside this solar facility and made our Controls in which there were no mirrors So those are the basically the three treatments and a control that that we looked at as far as pollinators and in each of these different types of treatments we we put vein traps out and left them for periods of time and So just to quickly give you an idea of what we did We did this in 2018 and 19 I'm only showing you the 2018 data because we were still going through the the insects collected from 2019 and so what you're looking at here is just this is all the bees put together and so bladed and mowed not real good for bees as But interestingly enough the halo and the control plots were pretty similar in the number of bees that that were documented, so here's a good example of a solar facility put it trying to figure out a ecological sound way of putting in mirrors and the little halo idea Really has has a positive impact on own be abundance and So those are three projects that I that I've worked on you know that have something to do with energy development And so in conclusion when you look at all of these projects when you're thinking about pollinators There's two main things you got to think about one is the vegetation What is the type of vegetation and what it how is it structured within the landscape? Is it providing floral resources? What did the root systems look like and how does it affect soil and in the second type which you should realize is very important is How does energy development? Disrupt soil so the bulk of your native pollinators nest in the ground So if you disturb soil you potentially disturb their nesting structure And so I'll end there So I just want to thank you for those that came to listen again I apologize for not being there due to the weather and I do want to just say that all of these Different projects that I have worked on it. They are collaborative projects with the USDA and multiple universities So thank you very much