Open and available localized species data from so-called collecting databases are a vital resource in management, research and education. A new master’s thesis from the University of Bergen is a good example of the importance of this type of data in education.
Bahar Mozfar is a master student at Ecological and Environmental Change Research Group (EECRG) at the Department of Biology, University of Bergen. She has done extensive fieldwork, and registered and species specific bumblebees in different habitats in most parts of southern Norway. During fieldwork their species specific Mozfar total 1089 bumblebees. It was found 26 species totaling 199 localities. After the fieldwork Mozfar compared her own findings with 33,484 datapoints on findings of bumblebees that are registered in the database of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). This was done to find out if data from GBIF matched own findings with regard to the distribution of the species.