The Pollinators Pavilion

Ariane Harrison

Yuxiang Chen, MS Arch ’18
Mingyu Park, MS Arch ’19

Graduate Architecture and Urban Design

Pollinator decline poses a major threat to the global agricultural food supply; yet while honeybee decline is well documented, 90 percent of the planet’s bees are native bees, responsible for 75 percent of non-agricultural pollination globally. Honeyless, hiveless, and stingerless, these primary pollinators provide a vital ecosystem service yet remain poorly understood: their discreet dwelling and diversity make them hard to identify. The Pollinators Pavilion addresses this gap by bringing architecture, machine learning technology, and conservation ecology together to prototype an analogous habitat / field station with an embedded monitoring system using machine learning to automate insect identification of solitary bees.

*Dr Jerome Rozen, American Museum of Natural History Apoidea Collection

*Dr Kevin Matteson, Project Dragonfly, University of Miami at Ohio