Native Bee and Nectar-Producing Plant Community Data from Iowa and Missouri (2017-2018)

The majority of tallgrass prairie in the American Midwest has been lost, largely due to extensive conversion to agriculture, with negative impacts on prairie-dependent taxa. Pastureland managed with both periodic fire and grazing (“pyric herbivory”) to mirror historic disturbance shows promise as a tool to restore grassland species’ diversity. The benefits of pyric herbivory management to the abundance and diversity of grassland insect pollinators has been demonstrated at "site" level but finer spatial scale benefits remain unclear. These data focus on native bee communities and nectar-producing flower abundance within sites either managed with graze and burn (same fire schedule as burn only but with cattle grazing) or patch-burn graze (grazing by cattle with a burn on one third of the site every year). The graze and burn sites were further managed against an invasive grass (tall fescue; Schedonorus arundinaceus) where one third of the site was left as a control, two thirds were sprayed with the herbicide glyphosate in 2014 and one of those two thirds was also seeded with native prairie plants the following spring. Native bees and flowers were sampled from May to August 2017 and 2018 on six sites in southern Iowa (Ringgold Co.) and norther Missouri (Harrison Co.).