Environmental Futures Seminar - Dr Michael Orr

Insects are the center of an ever-growing body of data and literature on potential declines, but to know even where something lives is no simple task when studying invertebrates. Consequently, some estimates of decline may overstate the seriousness of the situation, obscuring those real declines that are almost certainly taking place for some groups in some areas. Focusing primarily on bees, I will discuss several recent published and ongoing studies via which we are slowly bettering our knowledge of insect distribution using these vital pollinators as a focal group.

Michael Orr is an interdisciplinary taxonomist broadly interested in the biodiversity of bees. As the Group Leader on Insect-Plant Interactions at the Stuttgart Naturkundemuseum, he is working to better our knowledge of bees globally. Current projects include the systematics and phylogenomics of solitary bees, bee distribution and conservation, the evolution of mimicry, and capacity people in understudied regions. He has published over 110 articles on a wide range of topics, with leading roles on papers in journals including Current Biology, Nature Ecology & Evolution, Ecography, Bioscience, and Global Ecology and Biogeography.