BeEcoVie II – TopUp project for a bee-friendly spatial planning

Pollinators, especially bees, are essential for biodiversity and food security. In Vienna, a hotspot of bee diversity, urban beekeeping is growing, raising concerns about food competition between honeybees and wild bees due to spatial and temporal limited floral resources. The BeEcoVIE II project aims to assess and mitigate these issues by evaluating Vienna's current wild and domesticated bee populations and modeling the city's carrying capacity for bees. In BeEcoVIE I, we gathered over 12,000 wild bee records from literature and different scientific and citizen science databases. We identified areas with high bee diversity and potential competition zones based on functional trait similarity. BeEcoVie II will expand this work through three main objectives: a comprehensive survey of wild bees in understudied areas, especially conservation areas (e.g., Natura 2000), modeling foraging resources and habitat quality to determine bee carrying capacity, and developing an open-access tool, Hive.City, for sustainable beekeeping practices. This tool will help beekeepers and urban planners make informed decisions to reduce competitive pressures and enhance wild bee conservation. By promoting evidence-based strategies, the project aims to balance urban beekeeping with the preservation of wild bee populations, positioning Vienna as a leader in urban bee conservation and sustainable beekeeping.