My research program currently focuses on four areas:

1. Biodiversity and ecosystem services

Human well-being relies on services delivered by nature such as nutrient cycling, carbon storage, and pollination. How will biodiversity loss impact the continued delivery of these services? Surprisingly, there is no consensus answer to that question. We use native bee species and the pollination they provide as a model system for investigating biodiversity’s role in ecosystem services in large-scale, real-world landscapes. We ask such questions as, does pollination depend primarily on a few dominant bee species, or is the total number of bee species (a common measure of biodiversity) important? Does the need for biodiversity increase with increasing scales of space and time? We combine landscape-scale field work with statistical and simulation modeling to investigate these questions.

.2:  The forest bees of eastern North America

Our lab recently discovered that roughly a third of the bee species native to eastern North America are strongly associated with forest habitat (Harrison et al. 2018). These forest-associated bee species are predominantly in a few genera, including Andrena, Nomada, and Osmia, for which many species are ‘on the wing’ (active as adults) only in the spring. Presumably this phenology is an adaptation to eastern deciduous forests, where most herbs, shrubs and trees bloom in April and May. We are investigating how timber harvest and other forestry practices affect forest bees in commercial forests throughout the Northeast, and are metabarcoding pollen collected from foraging bees’ bodies to discover what plants forest bees feed on.

Left, Augochlora pura, one of the forest-associated bee species; photo by Max McCarthy. Right, sampling bees in a forestry chronoseries at Yale-Myers Forest, Connecticut.

3. Biodiversity measurement

Biodiversity measurement is not at all trivial when working in complex, real-world ecosystems where not all the individuals present can be observed. Lab members have made significant contributions to both the theory and the practice of biodiversity measurement; see for example Roswell, Dushoff and Winfree 2021, A conceptual guide to measuring species diversity. For bees, as for many insects, species-level identification has traditionally relied on destructive sampling (i.e., killing the bee maintaining specimen collections). In one current research project, we are collaborating with the National Park Service to develop and test non-lethal methods for measuring bee biodiversity in the field.

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4: Pollinator conservation and restoration

Our goal in this part of our work is to provide evidence-based guidelines for the government agencies and conservation organizations that work to conserve and restore pollinators. Collaborators (and funders) in this work include the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJ DEP), and the National Park Service (NPS).

Future Research Areas

We have grant proposals in progress to measure the impact of extreme climate events on bees using automated cameras with AI-assisted bee identification, and to investigate how climate change (warm winters, early springs, biologically ‘late’ frosts) impacts the interactions between bees and plants in northeastern forests. Stay tuned.

Selected Funded Grants

United States Department of Agriculture, NIFA Pollinator Health Program. Spring Fruit Crop Pollinators and Northeastern Forests: High-value Bees in Overlooked Habitats. R Winfree (PI), B Danforth (CoPI). Rutgers amount $695,410, 2023-2026

NSF DEB Population & Community Ecology. Broadening biodiversity-ecosystem functioning research to include mutualist networks. R Winfree (PI). 2020-2023. Rutgers amount $219,930

NSF / Belmont. OBServ: Open Library of Pollinator Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. N  Bartomeus (lead PI) with R Winfree (USA PI), L Garibaldi (Argentina PI), D Kleijn (Netherlands PI). 2019-2023. Rutgers amount $180,000

NSF DEB Population & Community Ecology. Synthetic analysis of the importance of species richness to ecosystem services in natural systems. M Genung (PI) with R Winfree (Co-PI). 2018-2020. Rutgers amount $149,998

National Park Service. Forest bee-plant networks at Great Lakes National Parks, R. Winfree (PI). 2017-2021. Rutgers amount $98,992

NSF DEB Population & Community Ecology. The role of species dominance in mediating biodiversity-ecosystem function relationships across spatial scales. R Winfree (PI) with NM Williams (Co-PI). 2016-2019. Rutgers amount $433,238 (including REU supplement 2017 $6,250 & 2018 $12,148)

US Fish and Wildlife Service. Comprehensively evaluating New Jersey’s bee pollinators for the State Wildlife Action Plan. R Winfree (PI) with T Harrison (Ph.D candidate) (PI), R Somes (PI), G Fowles (PI), D Jenkins (Project Manager). 2015-2016. Rutgers amount $75,000

Conservation Innovation Grant, Federal NRCS. Next steps in pollinator restoration. R Winfree (Co-PI) with Xerces Society (PI). 2012-2015. Rutgers amount $175,402

NSF DEB Dimensions of Biodiversity program. Genomics, functional roles, and diversity of the symbiotic gut microbiotae of honey bees and bumble bees. R Winfree (Lead senior investigator) with N Moran (PI) and J Evans (Co-PI). 2011-2016. Rutgers amount $97,528

USDA-AFRI. Strategies for Promoting Reliable Crop Pollination by Native Bees. R Winfree (PI) with NM Williams (Co-PI). 2009-2013. Rutgers amount $400,000

NSF DEB Population & Community Ecology. Community disassembly and ecosystem function: pollination services across agro-natural landscapes. R.Winfree (Co-PI) with C Kremen (PI) and NM Williams (PI). 2005-2009