Space Apps Challenge 2017

Neowise-beebox is a project in response to NASA’s Migratory Travels and Travel Stories Challenge.

Why are bees so important?

They are much more than honey producers.
They are responsible for about 90% of Brazilian flora polonization and have a direct participation in at least 8% of all the global food production. Its hard work is evaluated in approximately $577bn according to theguardian.

Bees also make an invaluable contribution to ecosystems around the world. Seeds, fruits and berries eaten by birds and mammals are all from plants that are pollinated by bees, making them guardians of the food chain and the biodiversity of our species.

The danger about the bees are not in it’s sting, but in the fact that they are becoming extinct.

Maurice Maeterlinck, a Nobel Prize winner from Belgium, once said: “If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.”

But most people don’t know about all of this. In Brazil for example, we can found beehives in some neighborhoods away from downtown, and because people are afraid of them and the local government or institutions don’t know where to relocate them, they end up destroying it or killing all of the bees.

There are already some engaged institutions that work to protect the bees, like SOS Abelhas, from Brazil and Greenpeace’s Greenbees. But they face issues like knowing where to relocate the bees.

After a lot of research, we decided to develop a app where the community can report where there is a beehive or a significant amount of bees in a region, allowing us to track where the bees are living and know what are the climate conditions in the reported places. And a web page to provide all the data we’ve collected, displaying on a map where bees were found and showing places with similar climate conditions where those bees could live. Allowing scientific analysis, as well as supporting beekeepers with all the data, helping institutions to know to where they could reallocate the bees.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com....

Resources Used:

https://www.ars.usda.gov/northeast-area/beltsville-md/beltsville-agricultural-research-center/bee-research-laboratory/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/26/decline-of-bees-poses-potential-risks-to-major-crops-says-un
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/17/why-are-bees-important
http://www.namu.com.br/materias/voce-sabe-para-que-servem-abelhas
http://sosabelhassemferrao.com.br/site/
https://data.nal.usda.gov/dataset/data-pathogen-webs-collapsing-honey-bee-colonies_145
https://catalog.data.gov/harvest/object/62179903-cdee-4003-bfd6-525dcb140155/html
http://hymenopteragenome.org/hymenopteramine/keywordSearchResults.do?searchTerm=loss+data&searchSubmit=Search
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.137...