Community science enhances modelled bee distributions in a tropical Asian city

Bees and the ecosystem services they provide are vital to urban ecosystems, but little is understood about their distributions, particularly in the Asian tropics. This is largely due to taxonomic impediments and limited inventorying, monitoring, and digitization of occurrence records. While expert collections (EC) are demonstrably insufficient by themselves as a data source to model and understand bee distributions, the boom of community science (CS) in urban areas provides an untapped opportunity to learn about bee distributions within our cities. We used CS observations in combination with EC observations to model the distribution of bees in Singapore, a small tropical city-state in Southeast Asia. To address the restricted spatial context, we performed multiple bias corrections and show that species distribution models performed well when estimating the distribution of habitat specialists with distinct range limits detectable within Singapore. We successfully modelled 37 bee species,..., Observations were obtained from both CS and EC databases (Table 1). EC observations were defined as those collected by individuals possessing specialised knowledge and experience in the study of bees, including formall-trained students in entomology and researchers associated with the National University of Singapore Insect Diversity Laboratory (PI Ascher), using targeted and standardised sampling methods (Ascher et al., 2019) supplemented by opportunistic sampling. This dataset was the primary basis for recent conservation assessments (Ascher et al., 2022). CS sources were defined as observations collected in large part by non-experts or non-formally trained individuals through open access repositories, such as iNaturalist (Robinson et al., 2020) and social media - specifically from the Facebook Group “The Bees and Wasps of Singapore” (https://www.facebook.com/groups/1450495321695805). Observations can be submitted by anyone to iNaturalist, which are then publicly available for other u..., , # Community science enhances modelled bee distributions in a tropical Asian city

## Description of the data and file structure

Observations were obtained from both community science(CS) and expert-collected(EC) databases (Table 1). EC observations were defined as those collected by individuals possessing specialised knowledge and experience in the study of bees, including formally-trained students in entomology and researchers associated with the National University of Singapore Insect Diversity Laboratory (PI Ascher), using targeted and standardised sampling methods (Ascher et al., 2019) supplemented by opportunistic sampling. This dataset was the primary basis for recent conservation assessments (Ascher et al., 2022). CS sources were defined as observations collected in large part by non-experts or non-formally trained individuals through open access repositories, such as iNaturalist (Robinson et al., 2020) and social media - specifically from the Facebook Group “The Bees and Wasps ...