Biological records of potentially host plants of mexican wild bees identified from iNaturalist

Biological records of potential host plants of Mexican wild bees identified from Naturalista (Mexican iNaturalist Node) observations. This is an interinstitutional effort that was carried out for the taxonomic curation and mobilization of plant observations compiled in the project “Xicotli Data: Native Bees and their Flowers”. Plant observations were obtained from bee photographs available in Naturalista. (https://www.naturalista.mx/projects/xicotli-data-abejas-mexicanas-y-sus-flores). The project and the resultant dataset of biological records of plants seek to maximize the use of the observations in Naturalista. Thus, it is expected to contribute to the documentation of native plant-bee interactions. This dataset is made up of a metadata and three tables: 1) occurrences; 2) ecomorphological attributes (see details here), and 3) type of interaction bee – plant (see details here). Taxonomic determination of plants from photographs is a great challenge. However, the plant taxonomists carried out the curation by mean of their expert knowledge and by consulting specialized literature (i.e., taxonomic descriptions and catalogues). They also compared the plants from the photograph with specimens of two Mexican herbaria: IEB-“Graciela Calderón and Jerzy Rzedowski ” (http://inecolbajio.com/index.php#) and MEXU-UNAM (http://www.ib.unam.mx/botanica/herbario/), applying a very conservative protocol that guarantees the greatest possible veracity of the taxonomic determinations. This dataset was generated within the framework of the project “Integration of biodiversity data of wild bee-plant interactions in Mexico” (https://www.gbif.org/es/project/BID-CA2020-021-NAC/integration-of-biodiversity-data-of-wild-bee-plant-interactions-in-mexico). The original Naturalista data can be consulted on the following resources: https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/download/0194949-230224095556074 and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7892227