Abstract
Species occurrence data are foundational for research, conservation, and science communication, but the limited availability and accessibility of reliable data represents a major obstacle, particularly for insects, which face mounting pressures. We present
BeeBDC
, a new
R
package, and a global bee occurrence dataset to address this issue. We combined >18.3 million bee occurrence records from multiple public repositories (GBIF, SCAN, iDigBio, USGS, ALA) and smaller datasets, then standardised, flagged, deduplicated, and cleaned the data using the reproducible
BeeBDC R
-workflow. Specifically, we harmonised species names (following established global taxonomy), country names, and collection dates and, we added record-level flags for a series of potential quality issues. These data are provided in two formats, “cleaned” and “flagged-but-uncleaned”. The
BeeBDC
package with online documentation provides end users the ability to modify filtering parameters to address their research questions. By publishing reproducible
R
workflows and globally cleaned datasets, we can increase the accessibility and reliability of downstream analyses. This workflow can be implemented for other taxa to support research and conservation.