My 3D Pollen – improving the database
At the beginning of 2023, the 3D Pollen Project dataset contained 35 species, most of them native to Europe. Over the coming years, we want to improve that. By the end of 2025, we want the dataset to be ten to 100 times larger, and globally representative of pollen diversity – of pollen's structure, of different branches on the plant tree of life, of Earth's different ecosystems, and of the various scientific disciplines to which pollen is important. Here's how we plan to do it, and how you can help.
A map showing the native ranges of the 35 species in the 3D Pollen Project database at the beginning of 2023 (from Wilson, 2023). European species are heavily over-represented.
Tell us what you want!
The first and most important thing we're doing is surveying people with interests in pollen. We want to know what 3D pollen models would be useful for you and your work, whatever that may be! We've put together a short survey for this.
It asks you to choose a pollen-related theme to contribute to (honey production, say, or palaeoecology), and then you can suggest up to 20 important pollen types for up to 10 geographical regions. You can submit your results completely anonymously if you'd like, or you can provide your email address if you're happy to be contacted about this work. More information about the survey can be found here. The results will be combined with information from other analyses (see below) to come up with a list of key pollen types for us to scan.
To access the survey, go to www.tinyurl.com/my3Dpollen, or click or scan the QR code below!
Data crunching
We're taking a few other approaches to help figure out what species to scan, too. We're working with Dr Alex Davey from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh to refine a list of pollen types that covers species from all across the plant phylogeny ('tree of life'), as well as almost the full range of pollen shapes and structures.
We've also been analysing data from the Neotoma palaeoecology database to work out which pollen types are important in different ecoregions around the world. This process is still ongoing, but so far an analysis of nearly 5,000 pollen sites from over 350 ecoregions has yielded more than 700 names! Encouragingly, these suggestions seem to be very sensible for areas where Neotoma holds lots of data, but many of the sampled ecoregions have few sites to base their suggestions on. Most of the world's ecosystems – especially outside North America and Europe – have no data at all.
To help us fill those gaps, please fill in the survey! And, if you would be interested in sifting through the automated pollen suggestions to help improve them, please let us know. (Similarly, if you know of any similar databases we could look at for other pollen-related research, get in touch!)
A map showing WWF Ecoregions, coloured by the number of Neotoma pollen sites (red dots) they contain. While European and North American regions are very well covered, most of the world has little or no data.