The University's Biodiversity and Environment Institute BIOMA collaborates in the creation of a national collection of pollinating insects.

The scientific collections housed in science museums are very useful to organize the scientific knowledge of the different species that have inhabited and still inhabit the world -identification, classification and description- and to facilitate their research and knowledge dissemination, in order to promote their conservation.  

The Biodiversity and Environment Institute BIOMA of the University of Navarra, together with the National Museum of Natural Sciences-CSIC of Madrid, the Museum of Natural Sciences of Barcelona, the University of Valencia and the Complutense University of Madrid, are developing theINC-STEP project , whose main goal is to create a large national reference letter collection of pollinating insects.

"Three out of four crops and almost 90% of other plants depend on pollinating insects. As these are collateral victims of pesticides, there is a cascade effect that reduces both the planet's biodiversity and crop yields, at a global cost of close to half a trillion euros," says Arturo Ariño, researcher at the BIOMA Institute of the University of Navarra.

This project has focused on six taxa of the fauna of Spain: the florid fly subfamily Eristalinae, the butterfly families Papilionidae and Hesperiidae, and the bee genera Bombus, Xylocopa and Colletes.

The BIOMA Institute is cataloguing entomological material from the natural history collections associated with the Science Museum of the University of Navarra to locate pollinators, while creating high-resolution images that facilitate their classification and monitoring in the field.

"Like the other participating centers, we first verified the material with financial aid from taxonomists with expertise in these groups and created the digital surrogates with advanced imaging techniques and then combined the primary biodiversity data from each record into a common database ," says David Galicia, researcher at Instituto BIOMA.

This project also aims to create an online platform so that researchers of these species can consult this collaborative collection. Another objective of the project is to give visibility to the science of taxonomy, whose function is essential for the conservation of science collections, and for this purpose it is planned to carry out different expert courses.

The INC-STEP project is being developed over two years with a budget of 200,000 euros funded by the European Union's Horizon Europe research and Innovation program in the framework of the TETTRIs project ("Transforming European Taxonomy through Training, Research and Innovations") and coordinated by the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales-CSIC. The University of Navarra team is led by the researcher Arturo Ariño and counts with the participation of David Galicia, Ana Amezcua, Ángel Chavesand María Imas.