Lunch Hour Lecture: The loss of bumblebees – why is it happening and why is it important?

Date: Tuesday 11 February 2020 Speaker: Tim Newbold - Senior Research Fellow at Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research, UCL About the lecture: The severe decline of insects has made headlines recently, but it is still unknown exactly why these declines are happening . We have been trying to understand why bumblebees are being lost across many parts of Europe and North America. We use a ‘big data’ approach making use of millions of sightings of bumblebees collected over the last 100 years . We have found that bumblebee losses are linked to both climate change and habitat loss. Predictions for the future paint a worrying picture for bumblebees. We have also been exploring what the changes mean for pollination of important human food crops. UCL's popular public Lunch Hour Lecture series has been running at UCL since 1942, and showcases the exceptional research work being undertaken across UCL. Free to attend, live stream or watch online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdWQXSBW2JY More info : http://events.ucl.ac.uk/lhl Join the conversation on Twitter at UCLEvents