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Status of Pollinators in North America (2007)

Chapter: A Committee Biographies

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Suggested Citation:"A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2007. Status of Pollinators in North America. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11761.
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Suggested Citation:"A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2007. Status of Pollinators in North America. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11761.
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Suggested Citation:"A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2007. Status of Pollinators in North America. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11761.
×

A
Committee Biographies

May Berenbaum (Chair) is Swanlund Professor and head of the Department of Entomology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Berenbaum obtained her Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Cornell University in 1980 and joined the University of Illinois faculty shortly thereafter; she currently holds affiliate appointments in the Department of Plant Biology, the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, and the Program in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and at the Center for Ecological Entomology at the Illinois Natural History Survey. Her primary research is on chemical mediation of interactions between plants and herbivorous insects, and her work ranges from the molecular to the community level. Dr. Berenbaum is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and a fellow of several scientific societies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her service to the National Academies has included two-terms as chair of the Board on Agriculture and Natural Resources, member of the NAS Council, and member of the National Research Council Report Review Committee. Dr. Berenbaum serves on several advisory boards and is currently president of the Board of Directors of the Xerces Society, an organization dedicated to the conservation of invertebrate animals.


Peter Bernhardt is a professor in the Department of Biology at St. Louis University and an associate of the Missouri Botanical Garden and the Royal Botanic Garden of Sydney. He received his Ph.D. in botany from the School of Botany at the University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Since 1976, Dr. Bernhardt has done field work in the ecology of animal-pollinated angio-

Suggested Citation:"A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2007. Status of Pollinators in North America. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11761.
×

sperms in relation to the compatibility (SI) systems. In North America, Dr. Bernhardt’s studies have included work on insect-pollinated Erythronium, Hepatica, Tolmeia, Penstemon, and Xerophyllum spp. His laboratory is under contract with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Services (Corvallis, Oregon) to study the pollination of three Potentilla species, Paeonia brownie, and Cypripedium montanum.


Stephen Buchmann is an adjunct professor of entomology and a research associate at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. He is president and cofounder of The Bee Works, LLC, an environmental consulting company in Tucson. For 21 years, Dr. Buchmann was a research entomologist with the Carl Hayden Bee Research Center of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service. His research is on conservation biology, pollination ecology, bee nesting, mating biology and chemical ecology, “buzz pollination” of crops, and the oil-harvesting centridine bees of the New World tropics. He is the author of more than 150 scientific publications and of 8 books, including The Forgotten Pollinators published in 1996 with Dr. Gary Nabhan, and Pollinators of the Sonoran Desert, Pollinator Conservation Handbook, and Letters from the Hive. His first children’s book is The Bee Tree (Cinco Puntos Press). With Gary Nabhan, he cofounded and directed the trinational Forgotten Pollinators Campaign from the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. Dr. Buchmann is a research associate in entomology with the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He is a fellow of the Linnean Society of London. He serves on the steering committee of the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign and as its research chair. Dr. Buchmann routinely works with natural history film-makers and was associate producer of the 2001 “Pollinators in Peril” television documentary, produced by Turner Original Productions and the National Wildlife Federation.


Nicholas W. Calderone is director of the Cornell University Dyce Laboratory for Honey Bee Studies. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. from the Ohio State University. He currently has responsibilities in research, teaching, and extension, and he does work on methods for controlling parasites and pathogens of honey bees. His research concerns the development of Africanized-free honey bees that are resistant to parasitic mites and honey bee pathogens. He spent 7 years with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service’s Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland where he focused on the biology of Varroa destructor and on the use of integrated pest management to control parasitic mites in honey bees. Dr. Calderone is the author of more than 40 peer-reviewed research papers and more than 30

Suggested Citation:"A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2007. Status of Pollinators in North America. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11761.
×

extension articles on honey bee management. In 2000, he was coauthor of an article on the value of honey bee pollination to agricultural production in the United States. He also has developed a master beekeeper program that serves beekeepers in the northeastern United States.


Paul Goldstein is the assistant curator of Lepidoptera at the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity of the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville. Before moving to Florida, Dr. Goldstein was curator in the Division of Insects at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois, where he presided over the Lepidoptera collection and served as a principal investigator in the Pritzker Laboratory for Molecular Systematics. Dr. Goldstein’s research has focused on the evolution of host plant associations in herbivorous insects, particularly moths, and on conservation genetics and invertebrate conservation and monitoring programs in prairies, and in pitch pine and scrub oak barrens, among other unusual plant communities. Since 1986, Dr. Goldstein has devoted many of his conservation efforts to the Massachusetts coastline and its offshore islands, where he works on the conservation genetics of the northeastern beach tiger beetle, the reintroduction of the imperial moth, and the use of assemblages of threatened moths and butterflies for landscape-level conservation.


David W. Inouye is a professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Maryland, College Park. He was an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, and he received his Ph.D. in zoology from the University of North Carolina. He directs the graduate program in sustainable development and conservation biology at the University of Maryland and teaches courses in ecology and conservation biology. From 1988 to 1990, he was director of the University of Colorado’s Mountain Research Station. Dr. Inouye has conducted field research at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (Colorado) since 1971, where he has studied resource partitioning in bumble bees, pollination biology, plant demography, and ant-plant mutualisms. His current work is on long-term studies of variation in the phenology and abundance of flowering by wildflowers—to identify the effects of environmental variables and climate change on flowering and to identify the consequences for consumers. He also has done research on pollination biology in the Snowy Mountains in Australia and in Panama. His field work has taken him to South Africa, Austria, and Costa Rica. Dr. Inouye is coauthor of the book Techniques for Pollination Biologists. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign, a member of the Task Force on Declining Pollination Services, of the Species Survival Commission of the IUCN (The World Conservation Union), and secretary of the Governing Board of the Ecological Society of America.

Suggested Citation:"A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2007. Status of Pollinators in North America. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11761.
×

Peter Kevan is a professor of environmental biology and botany at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. His experience in pollination started with work in the Canadian High Arctic. Since receiving his doctorate in 1970, Dr. Kevan has worked on pollination ecology in Asia, the Americas, Africa, Australia, and Europe. He also has worked extensively on natural, agricultural, plantation, and forest pollination problems, with special emphasis on practical and conservation issues. His research in the 1970s on the demise of pollinators caused by insecticides in New Brunswick, Canada, stimulated serious consideration of the consequences of pesticide use in forestry. He is chair of the Task Force on Declining Pollination of the IUCN (The World Conservation Union), he is actively involved in pollination initiatives arising from the Convention on Biological Diversity, and he is a member of the Steering Committee for the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign.


Claire Kremen is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, and an associate conservationist with the Wildlife Conservation Society. She received her Ph.D. in zoology from Duke University and her B.Sc. in biology from Stanford University. Her current work is on the use of biological, social, and economic data to develop conservation plans that benefit people and the environment. She has studied an array of topics in conservation biology, including the economics and ecology of ecosystem services, sustainable forestry, the ecology and biogeography of tropical butterflies, the population biology of lemurs, and ecological monitoring. Her work reaches from theory to practice and includes hands-on conservation action. From 1993 to 1997, she designed and helped to establish Madagascar’s largest National Park on the Masoala Peninsula. Her current research examines the functional links between the spatial distribution of wildlands, the composition of wild bee communities, farm management practices, and the delivery of pollination services for agriculture in California and New Jersey. She is leading a National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis working group that uses models and meta-analysis to identify ways to restore pollination services in degraded landscapes. She also is working with organizations in Madagascar to establish a national conservation-planning tool by accumulating data on species occurrences, developing predictive models of species distributions, and conducting conservation analyses. She is a scientific advisor for several conservation organizations and she sits on the editorial board of Conservation Biology. She is a 2001 recipient of the McDonnell 21st Century Research Award.


Rodrigo A. Medellín is director of the Institute of Ecology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He is also an adjunct professor at

Suggested Citation:"A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2007. Status of Pollinators in North America. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11761.
×

Columbia University in New York City and an associate researcher at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. Dr. Medellín has studied and worked on the ecology and conservation of mammals in Mexico for 25 years. After completing his undergraduate studies at the University of Mexico he obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Florida. Dr. Medellín’s work in rainforests, deserts, and montane forests has included diverse approaches: community ecology, plant-animal interactions, population biology, and more recently, molecular ecology. He has produced more than 70 publications, including more than 40 scientific papers in international journals and 6 books and book chapters on bat ecology and conservation, mammal diversity analyses, and conservation of large mammals. Dr. Medellín was head of the Wildlife Department of the Mexican federal government from 1995 to 1996. He has been president of the Mexican Society of Mammalogists and has served as chair of the Committee for International Relations. He currently chairs the Latin American Fellowship Committee of the American Society of Mammalogists, and has been a member of the Board of Directors for that society for 6 years and was elected in June 2004 to a third 3-year term. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Bat Conservation International, and he is founder and director of the 10-year-old Program for the Conservation of Bats of Mexico.


Taylor Ricketts is the director of World Wildlife Fund conservation science program. His research is on global patterns of biodiversity and threats, ecological and economic consequences of habitat fragmentation, and interactions between people and nature in agricultural landscapes. Dr. Ricketts analyzes compiled data sets for insight about the global picture of biodiversity, how patterns in biodiversity relate to those of human threats, and how the information can be applied to support conservation efforts. Dr. Ricketts’s field studies focus on the value of tropical forest fragments as sources of wild pollinators for neighboring coffee crops. That project is part of his long-standing interests in the interactions between habitat fragments and surrounding agricultural areas and in improving the potential of those landscapes to support native biodiversity. Dr. Ricketts received his Ph.D. from Stanford University and has received numerous awards for his work from the Society for Conservation Biology, the National Science Foundation, the Summit Foundation, and others.


Gene E. Robinson joined the faculty of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1989 and is the university’s G. William Arends Professor of Integrative Biology. He is also the director of the University of Illinois Bee Research Facility, director of the Neuroscience Program, theme leader at the Institute for Genomic Biology, and a professor of entomology with affiliate appointments in the Departments of Cell & Developmental Biology and

Suggested Citation:"A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2007. Status of Pollinators in North America. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11761.
×

Animal Biology and in the Beckman Institute of Science and Technology. Dr. Robinson obtained his Ph.D. in entomology from Cornell University in 1986. He is the author or coauthor of more than 150 publications, including articles published in Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He pioneered the application of genomics to the study of social behavior, led the effort to gain approval from the National Institutes of Health for sequencing the honey bee genome, and heads the Honey Bee Genome Sequencing Consortium. Dr. Robinson has been honored as a University Scholar, Fulbright Fellow, and Guggenheim Fellow. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and NAS.


Allison A. Snow is a professor of evolution, ecology, and organismal biology at the Ohio State University in Columbus. Dr. Snow received her Ph.D. in botany from the University of Massachusetts. She is noted for her expertise in the evolutionary ecology of plant populations, including breeding systems, pollination ecology, and conservation biology. Dr. Snow’s research focuses on hybridization as a stimulus for rapid evolution in weedy and invasive plants. She has published widely in peer-reviewed journals, and she has produced several technical reports and book chapters on transgenic plants, pollination ecology, and gene flow. Dr. Snow is an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow of the Ecological Society of America and is the current president of the Botanical Society of America. She served on the National Research Council’s Committee on Genetically Modified Pest-Protected Plants and on the Committee on Biological Confinement of Genetically Engineered Organisms.


Scott M. Swinton is a professor of agricultural economics at Michigan State University in East Lansing. Dr. Swinton teaches agricultural production economics, agribusiness operations management, and ecological economics. He received his M.S. from Cornell University and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. His economic research on agricultural production and environmental management focuses on technology evaluation and policy analysis. He concentrates on understanding the conditions required for business profitability to be compatible with environmental stewardship. Dr. Swinton also is engaged in research on agricultural and natural resource management in Latin America and Africa. He has published more than 45 journal articles and edited 3 books. He currently serves on the editorial board of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.


Leonard B. Thien is a professor in the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. He received an M.S. in botany (systematics and evolution) from Washington University, St. Louis, and a Ph.D. in botany (evolution) from the University of

Suggested Citation:"A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2007. Status of Pollinators in North America. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11761.
×

California, Los Angeles. Dr. Thien’s research is on the pollination biology of ancient plants in the ANITA group—the first three branches of the flowering plant phylogenetic tree. Dr. Thien has published papers on the pollination mechanisms and population structure of Amborella (sister to the angiosperms). He also elucidated the pollination mechanisms and breeding systems of Illicium and Trimenia (the third branch of the angiosperm cladogram). In North America, Dr. Thien’s work includes mosquito pollination in orchids (Habenaria in northern Wisconsin and Canada), bee pollination of orchids in the bogs of northern Wisconsin, and beetle and fly pollination of magnolia in the southern United States and Mexico. In 1991, Dr. Thien was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his work on pollination mechanisms in basal (ancient) angiosperms. Dr. Thien is working with a group of Chinese scientists on the pollination of Schisandra (ANITA group, third branch) in North America and Southeast Asia. The work involves pollination, construction of a DNA cladogram, and an analysis of all aspects of the breeding system.


F. Christian Thompson is a research entomologist at the Systematic Entomology Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a scientist in the Department of Entomology at the Smithsonian Institution. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research is in the systematics of flower flies (Syrphidae). He also has expertise on other families of agricultural concern (Anthomyiidae, Asilidae, Braulidae, Phoridae, and Pipunculidae) and other groups important for biological control (Pipunculidae, Conopidae). His current research includes projects on the flower flies of Costa Rica, nearctic flower flies, and genera of flower flies.

Suggested Citation:"A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2007. Status of Pollinators in North America. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11761.
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Suggested Citation:"A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2007. Status of Pollinators in North America. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11761.
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Suggested Citation:"A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2007. Status of Pollinators in North America. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11761.
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Suggested Citation:"A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2007. Status of Pollinators in North America. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11761.
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Suggested Citation:"A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2007. Status of Pollinators in North America. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11761.
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Suggested Citation:"A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2007. Status of Pollinators in North America. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11761.
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Suggested Citation:"A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2007. Status of Pollinators in North America. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11761.
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Suggested Citation:"A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2007. Status of Pollinators in North America. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11761.
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Suggested Citation:"A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2007. Status of Pollinators in North America. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11761.
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Status of Pollinators in North America Get This Book
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Pollinators—insects, birds, bats, and other animals that carry pollen from the male to the female parts of flowers for plant reproduction—are an essential part of natural and agricultural ecosystems throughout North America. For example, most fruit, vegetable, and seed crops and some crops that provide fiber, drugs, and fuel depend on animals for pollination.

This report provides evidence for the decline of some pollinator species in North America, including America's most important managed pollinator, the honey bee, as well as some butterflies, bats, and hummingbirds. For most managed and wild pollinator species, however, population trends have not been assessed because populations have not been monitored over time. In addition, for wild species with demonstrated declines, it is often difficult to determine the causes or consequences of their decline. This report outlines priorities for research and monitoring that are needed to improve information on the status of pollinators and establishes a framework for conservation and restoration of pollinator species and communities.

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