What's changed

THATSBees — Changelog — 2026-09-14 (v1.8.2)

New

• State checklists now sit on top of the data instead of rewriting it. When a state's checklist is imported, every species it lists is recorded as that checklist's own claim, including the ones the data already had. Its presence records are added only where the data didn't already place the species in that state, and they're marked as the checklist's, so removing a checklist removes exactly what it added and nothing else. A checklist's view of which names are synonyms now decides where its own records go, without changing the taxonomy every other state sees.
• A checklist adds a species only when it is genuinely new. A listed name is matched against our species by name, by recorded synonym, by GBIF key and by GBIF's own synonym list. A new species is created only when none of those find it and GBIF confirms an accepted bee species under exactly that name. Everything else goes on a review list on the Import page, with the reason for each name. Reading Colorado's published checklist (887 names) this way added 6 species and listed 69 names for review, among them fragments of the document's prose such as "Halictus and".
• Editing is scoped to the states people look after. Species data that every state shares — traits, habitats, floral hosts, threats, wiki text, assessments — can now be edited only by national admins. State presence, SGCN status and state checklists can be edited by national admins anywhere, and by contributors, editors and state admins only in the states assigned to them. The edit page shows each person only what they can change, and says why the rest is read-only.

Fixes

• SGCN status could not be added or removed. Both actions wrote to database columns that don't exist, so every attempt failed. They work now.
• A refused edit looked as if it had saved. When the server turned an edit down, the edit page carried on as though it had succeeded. It now shows the server's reason.
• Adding a state by hand overwrote where the record came from. Marking a species present in a state that a dataset already recorded replaced the dataset's attribution. The existing record is now left as it is.
• Anyone could re-import an assessment document. The import endpoint accepted requests without signing in. It now requires a national admin.

Data

• The species created by February's checklist imports have been re-checked. The Minnesota and Vermont imports created 12 species rows. Checked under the new rule, 4 are genuinely new species and stay. The other 8 duplicate species already held under another name — for example Eucera albata is Tetraloniella albata, and Coelioxys bisoncornuus is Coelioxys bisoncornua — or, in one case ("Nomada mr"), are a fragment of a name. Those 8 are no longer counted, each points at the species it duplicates, and their state records were copied to that species. Nothing was deleted.
• Filtering by data source returned nothing, or the wrong thing. The filter panel had two ways to ask where data came from, "Data Source" and "Contributing Dataset", and only the second worked. Data Source was an early shortcut: choosing Fowler or Bee-Gap listed no species at all (they cover 1,091 and 317), and IUCN Assessment just repeated the Has Assessment checkbox. It has been removed. Contributing Dataset is now the one place to filter by source, with a line underneath explaining what it means and a link to Sources, which shows what each dataset contributed.
• Species with text written on the site now have their own filter. Data Source's fourth option, BeeWiki, was never about a dataset — it meant species whose description or notes were written by contributors here. That is now a separate "Has Wiki Text" checkbox beside Has Assessment and SGCN.
• The dataset dropdown's numbers didn't match what it listed. Each option showed a count across every species in the database, then listed only US species — Fowler read 1,097 and opened a list of 1,091. The counts now describe US species, so the number beside an option is the number of species it opens.
• Old links keep working. A bookmarked or shared link that used the removed filter now opens the equivalent new filter, and the address bar updates to match.

THATSBees — Changelog — 2026-09-11 (v1.8.0)

New

• The home page's counts now describe US bees, and they follow your filters. The five figures beside the map used to report the whole database and sat frozen no matter what you filtered on. They now count the 3,981 species with confirmed US presence — matching the species list exactly — and every one of them responds to the filter panel. Filter to Apidae and the counts become Apidae's; pick a state and they become that state's. Hovering any figure now says what it counts.
• "Contributors" is now "Datasets". The figure was counting registered site accounts, which is not what the word suggests and read as 1. It now counts the 11 published datasets the site's records come from — Noori, NatureServe, Ostwald, Smith, Fowler, the assessments, BeeGap, Big-Bee, Thrift and BeeFunc — and links to Sources, where each one's contribution is broken down. It stays site-wide rather than changing with filters: a dataset does not become a different dataset because one state is selected.

Fixes

• Filtering never changed the home page's counts. The page requested a web address that did not exist, and the resulting error quietly restored the unfiltered numbers, so the figures appeared to ignore every filter. They now come from an endpoint that exists and agree with the species list for every filter tested.
• Assessments was counting superseded revisions. It reported 334 where the rest of the site shows 323, because 11 of those rows are earlier revisions kept as evidence. It now counts current assessments only, as everywhere else.
• The map ignored the Contributing Dataset filter. Choosing a dataset changed the species list but left the map and its counts unchanged. The map now honours it on both the national and per-state views.
• New changelogs were being created under the old project name. The September rename to THATSBees updated the changelog that existed at the time but missed the template that generates new ones, so every release since was titled "cSWG". The template is fixed and the affected entry corrected. Entries written before the rename keep their original name, which was accurate then.

THATSBees — Changelog — 2026-09-10 (v1.7.0)

New

• A menu in the top-right corner, and a profile you can edit. The header's scattered icons are gone. A single menu button now holds Watchlist, Changelog and Logout, and the person icon beside it opens your profile — your name, email, role, institution, assigned states and last sign-in — with your name, username and institution editable in place.
• Release notes are readable on the site. The Changelog menu item opens the notes for every release, newest first, alongside the version the site is currently running. Until now these existed only as files in the repository.
• The species list can be filtered and sorted by which dataset contributed its data. A new "Contributing Dataset" filter lists the eleven datasets behind the site — Noori (GloBI), NatureServe, Ostwald, Smith, Fowler, the assessments, BeeGap, Big-Bee, Thrift and BeeFunc — each with the number of bees it has something to say about, so you can ask "which species does Thrift's range work cover?" and get the 232 of them. The list itself gains a Datasets column naming those sources per species, and every column heading is now clickable to sort — including by how many datasets describe a species, which surfaces the best-documented bees first.
• A species can now carry more than one assessment, and the site always shows the current one. Until now every species had exactly one assessment, enforced by a database constraint. Assessments are now revisions: the new one becomes current, the one it replaces is kept in full and marked superseded, and the species page, map, API and wiki all resolve to the current revision. Nothing from the older assessment is deleted — it remains readable evidence of what was concluded in 2024.
• Habitat now shows every scheme that describes a species at once. A species can be described by the IUCN habitat classes from its 2024 assessment and the ecoregions from its 2026 revision, side by side, rather than one replacing the other. Four vocabularies now coexist: IUCN, CEC ecoregions, the French INPN typology, and Bee-Gap.
• NatureServe conservation status. Global, national and subnational ranks and the ESA listing are loaded and shown, and the Import page now says when they were last refreshed, so a stale rank is visible rather than silently old.

Data

• 90 revised bee assessments, covering all seven regional review groups — Midwest 5, Mountain Prairie 12, Northeast 9, Pacific 8, Pacific Southwest 27, Southeast 7, Southwest 22 — across roughly 33 genera. 79 are the first assessment for that species; 11 supersede an assessment loaded in 2024. Assessors: Killingsworth, S. and Martínez-López, O., facilitated and compiled by Chesshire et al.
• 80 reviewer comments are loaded with the assessments they annotate. Several of these documents are still under review and their reviewers say so — that the rank needs re-evaluating, that occurrences are missing, that an AOO needs revising. Those comments are recorded against the assessment rather than lost when the document was read, so the disagreement stays visible next to the number it disputes.
• The CEC North American Level III ecoregion vocabulary, 247 terms across three levels (15 / 50 / 182), from the Commission for Environmental Cooperation's own atlas. This replaces a US-only seed that could not name the Canadian and Mexican regions the assessments actually use. 831 ecoregion claims are recorded across the 90 species.
• Quantified decline drivers. For assessments listed under criteria A2c or A3c, the modelled decline percentages that justify the listing — climate change, pesticide loading and land use change, separately, against extent of occurrence and area of occupancy — are now stored as numbers rather than only as prose.
• Four species added that the assessments name but the checklist lacked: Anthidium atripoides, Anthophora caudata, Epeolus attenboroughi and Perdita albomaculata, each verified against GBIF. Three were described after the original checklist was built.

Notes

• The revised assessments arrive as Word documents rather than Google Docs, in a restructured format. docs/assessment_v2_census.md records what changed, what the format dropped, and what is known to be incomplete in the source documents.

THATSBees — Changelog — 2026-09-03 (v1.4.0)

New

• A state's published checklist can now be imported as itself. Twenty states have a bee checklist that GBIF does not carry — Colorado's museum PDF, Virginia's provisional list, the Bees of Wisconsin — and until now the Import page could only file a checklist if GBIF happened to publish it as a dataset. Import Source files the publication itself: it fetches the document, reads the species out of it, and matches them against our database. Virginia's list yields 475 names, 466 of which we already hold; Colorado's yields 957.
• Names that match nothing are listed, never created. These are journal PDFs and scanned appendices, and their near-misses are exactly the kind of thing that would quietly become new species: Virginia's nine unmatched names include Nomada lousianae for louisianae and Melissodes fimbriatus for fimbriata. They are reported for review under "see unmatched" and left alone. A name is only counted when the genus we matched agrees with the genus the checklist printed, so a missed heading in a document cannot attach a species to the wrong genus.
• Every checklist now says where it came from. Current Assignments has a Type column — GBIF for a checklist dataset, Other for a published document — and GBIF-sourced checklists are named with the acronym, so the source is legible wherever the title travels, including the state records each one writes.
• The Import page now lists every state's published bee checklist. Fifteen states have a statewide bee list in print — Utah's 1,167 species, Washington's 565, Colorado's ~1,006 — eight more have partial coverage, and twenty-seven have nothing published. All fifty are now listed with the citation, a link to the list where one is hosted online, and the species counts and caveats each source reports. Filter by coverage, or narrow to one state with the header filter.
• Import tries to match a published checklist to a GBIF dataset. Press Import on a state and the site searches GBIF for a checklist dataset of that state's bees. A confident match is filed under Current Assignments with the published citation attached, ready for Ingest Species; Michigan matches Gibbs et al. 2017 and Vermont the Vermont Atlas of Life checklist this way. Most states have no GBIF dataset — that is the normal answer, and the page says so plainly rather than treating it as a failure. Where the search returns something plausible but not certain, the candidates are shown with their bee-species counts for a curator to choose from.
• The site is now called THATSBees. The name spells out what it holds: Traits, Habitats, Actions, Threats, Status. The full title reads US Native Bees: Traits, Habitats, Actions, Threats, Status, and the previous name BeeCSWG is gone from the header, footer, home page, sign-in page, page titles and the API docs.
• Sign-in emails come from THATSBees. The subject line, the message and the sender name all use the new name — they had still been signed BeeWiki, two names back. The noreply@beewiki.org address is unchanged, so nothing about delivery changes.
• Two menu items renamed to say what they do. Data is now Import, which is where GBIF state checklists are brought in. Provenance is now Sources, which is where every dataset behind the site is listed with a link to cite.
• BeeWiki remains the project's background identity. The public name is THATSBees, but beewiki.org still serves the site and is now acknowledged in the footer, so arriving by either address makes sense. Everything underneath keeps the BeeWiki name: the domain, the noreply@beewiki.org sender, the stylesheet and script filenames, and the sign-in token issuer. cswg.vtatlasoflife.org is unchanged.

Fixes

• The "Bees only" species counts on the Import page were wrong. GBIF ignores a family filter on a dataset-scoped species search, so every dataset was being credited with six times its total record count as "bee species" — a trilobite monograph looked like a bee checklist. Bee families are now counted from the records themselves, so the number beside each dataset is the number of bee species it actually holds.

Big-Bee (Seltmann et al. 2021)

• *The site now records what a bee is found with, not only what it feeds on. The Big-Bee network's interaction database — hand-extracted from 39 papers, some of them from the 1890s — adds 2,695 records about 253 US bees. Alongside flower visits it brings the associations cSWG had nowhere to put: the cuckoo bees that rob a nest, the phorid flies and conopids that parasitise adults, Varroa* mites, the viruses found replicating in honey bees, and the fungi and other insects recorded sharing a nesting site. Each record keeps the paper it came from, the place, the date, the sex and the body part the author reported.
• *A new section on species pages, Other Species.* It lists non-plant partners grouped by kind — cleptoparasitism, parasitism, pathogens, predation, co-occurrence — with the number of records and papers behind each and a link to cite. Where two bees in the database are the two sides of one record, it appears on both pages, read from each bee's point of view: the cuckoo bee's page says it robs its host, and the host's page says it is robbed.
• *Records a paper reported as not happening are kept and marked.* Forty-one rows are a source's negative finding — it looked and did not find the association. They are shown labelled rather than dropped, and they are excluded from the floral host counts, because counting them as evidence of an association would say the opposite of what the paper found.
• 438 new bee–plant pairs. The other 1,001 flower-visit relationships in this dataset were already in the database from Noori et al.; those are left as they were, and the Big-Bee record with its own citation now sits behind them.
• 2,803 specimen measurements of body size. Notes from Nature volunteers measured intertegular distance — the standard proxy for bee body size — from museum specimen images, five people per specimen with the results reconciled. Thirty-one species gain real specimen-level measurements, most of them Hesperapis, a genus with almost no published trait data. They appear under Functional Traits as specimen measurements, kept separate from published species averages as always.
• Four things in the source were deliberately not taken at face value. Thirty-four rows citing one 2006 paper carried 31 different DOIs, each made by adding a counter to the real one; they are loaded as the single work they are. Measurements outside 0.5–8 mm are a volunteer's scale-setting slip rather than a bee, and 183 were skipped. A microscope file reporting intertegular distances of 17–20 mm — ten times every published value — is graticule divisions mislabelled as millimetres and was not loaded at all. The American Museum of Natural History expedition was left out because its catalogue numbers match no occurrence record, so there is no way to say which species was measured.
• Old names still find their species. LaBerge and Cockerell wrote Tetralonia, Synhalonia and Dialictus for bees the database holds under Melissodes, Anthophora and Lasioglossum. 208 records were attached through the current name, with the name the paper used kept beside them.

cSWG — Changelog — 2026-09-02 (v1.1.1)

New

• Every species page now shows what we actually know about the bee, with the measurements behind it. A Functional Traits section lists body size, tongue length and pilosity for 1,500-plus species — the mean, the range, how many measurements it rests on, and how many separate studies contributed. Specimen measurements and published species-level averages are summarised separately and never mixed, because they are not comparable: for one bee the two differ by 13%, and a single averaged number would have matched neither.
• A new "Where this data comes from" page. Reachable from Provenance in the top nav, it shows the size of the database, what each published dataset contributed and to which part of the site, and a link to cite for every source. The counts are live, not a snapshot.
• Data source badges are now links. The source tags on a species page point at the DOI or the deposit the records came from, so any figure on the page can be followed to its publication in one click.
• Bee–plant interactions, at a scale the site has not held before. 157,562 bee–plant associations covering 3,024 bees and 2,716 plant genera. Each records what kind of interaction it is — foraging, flower visiting, larval provisioning, pollination — how many observations support it, and how many of those were made in the United States.
• Nesting is described far more fully. New to the site: nest type (does the bee excavate, reuse a cavity, build, or parasitise?), nest slope, and nest aggregation — whether a solitary bee nests alone or packed together with others. Nesting materials went from 1 species to 31.
• Flight periods and diet breadth. Recorded flight months for 104 species, flight-season statistics for 1,241, and diet breadth for 1,300-plus — held as claims with the evidence behind each, so a specialist designation from field records and one from a published classification can sit side by side and disagree.
• Habitat can now be described in more than one classification. Habitat vocabularies are stored side by side rather than forced into a single scheme, with crosswalks recorded between them. IUCN and the French INPN typology are both loaded; adding another is now a configuration change, not a rewrite.
• Software version and schema state are visible. /api/version reports the running version, and the Provenance page warns plainly if the database schema is behind the deployed code.

Fixes

• Species records that were the same bee twice have been merged. 164 duplicate species — the same taxon under two spellings, such as Osmia foxi and Osmia foxii — were being counted as separate species and splitting their data between them. They are now one record each, with the discarded spelling kept as a synonym so old exports still resolve.
• 155 species names were corrected to their accepted form: Andrena cressoni → cressonii, Melissodes bimaculata → bimaculatus, and similar.
• Pollen specialisation that had gone missing has been restored. Merging duplicate species had silently dropped 58 specialist designations, leaving two bees — Melissodes perpolitus and M. personatellus — with no record of their specialisation anywhere. Recovered, along with 215 taxonomy and common-name fields.
• Bee-Gap's own citations are no longer discarded. All 3,922 species carried one identical blanket citation while the source file's per-species references were read and thrown away. Every species now carries its real references — 15,581 links to 487 published works, averaging four per species.

Data

Five datasets loaded, all filtered to species that occur in the United States.

• Ostwald et al. 2024, Toward a Functional Trait Approach to Bee Ecology (Ecology and Evolution 14(10):e70465) — 11,627 body size, tongue and pilosity measurements across 1,535 species.
• Noori et al. 2026, A curated and integrated dataset for exploring global bee–plant interactions — 121,953 interaction associations, aggregated from 810,788 observation records of US bees.
• Smith et al. 2024, Pollen specialist bee species are accurately predicted from visitation, occurrence and phylogenetic data (Oecologia) — diet breadth, range size and flight season for 1,291 US-native species. Also added 50 US bees the database did not previously hold.
• Thrift et al. 2026, Concentrated vulnerabilities in bees: Diet specialists have smaller geographic ranges (Insect Conservation and Diversity) — extent of occurrence and quantitative diet breadth for 232 species.
• BeeFunc (Aubouin et al. 2025) — the US-relevant tenth of a French trait database: nesting detail, sociality, phenology and European Red List status for the Holarctic and introduced bees shared between the two faunas.

Species not currently known from the United States are kept, not deleted — a bee can turn up in a new survey or in digitised historical material. They are held in full and excluded from counts and default views, and can be surfaced with one filter.