Xicotli Data: a project to retrieve plant-bee interactions from citizen science.

Background: Xicotli data is the short name given to the dataset generated within the project framework "Integration of Biodiversity Data for the Management and Conservation of Wild Bee-Plant Interactions in Mexico (2021-2023)", as xicotli is the generic word for a bee in Nahuatl. The team comprised eco-informaticians, ecologists and taxonomists of both native bees and flora. The generated dataset contains so far 4,532 curated records of the plants, which are potential hosts of species of three focal families of bees native to Mexico: Apidae, Halictidae and Megachilidae and morphological and ecological data of the plant-bee interactions.

SPECIES: A platform for the exploration of ecological data.

The modeling of ecological data that include both abiotic and biotic factors is fundamental to our understanding of ecosystems. Repositories of biodiversity data, such as GBIF, iDigBio, Atlas of Living Australia, and SNIB (Mexico's National System of Biodiversity Information), contain a great deal of information that can lead to knowledge discovery about ecosystems. However, there is a lack of tools with which to efficiently extract such knowledge.