Bees visit native and non-native plant species for pollen and nectar resources in urban, agricultural, and wildland environments. Results of an extensive survey of bee-flower collection records from 10 California cities from 2005-2011 were used to examine host-plant records of native and non-native ornamental plants to diverse native and non-native bee species; five cities were from northern California and five were from southern California. A total of 7,659 bees and their floral host plants were examined. Of these, 179 were Apis mellifera and 7,390 were non-Apis. Only four other non-native species (all in Megachilidae) were recorded in the survey, and together they accounted for 402 individuals. These bees have been databased in preparation for deposition in the University of California-Berkeley Essig Museum of Entomology. We identified 229 bee species and 42 genera visiting native and non-native plant types in urban areas. Of the 229 species, 71 bee species were collected from only native plants; 52 were collected from only non-native host plants; and 106 were collected from both types of plants. Native bee species were common on native plants and non-native plants, but there were substantially more non-native bee species visiting non-native plants compared to native plants. Flowering periods in months were similar for both types of plants, but non-natives tended to flower later in the year. We propose that using native and non-native plants improves habitat gardening by increasing opportunities for attracting a richer diversity of bee species and for longer periods. Knowing basic bee-flower relationships in an area is key to planning a bee habitat garden with a variety of plant types, regardless of their geographic origin.

Experience and training in field work are critical components of undergraduate education in ecology, and many university courses incorporate field‐based or experiential components into the curriculum in order to provide students hands‐on experience. Due to the onset of the COVID‐19 pandemic and the sudden shift to remote instruction in the spring of 2020, many instructors of such courses found themselves struggling to identify strategies for developing rigorous field activities that could be completed online, solo, and from a student's backyard. This case study illustrates the process by which one field‐based course, a UC California Naturalist certification course offered at the University of California, Davis, transitioned to fully remote instruction. The transition relied on established, publicly available, online participatory science platforms (e.g., iNaturalist) to which the students contributed data and field observations remotely. Student feedback on the course and voluntary‐continued engagement with the participatory science platforms indicates that the student perspective of the experience was on par with previous traditional offerings of the course. This case study also includes topics and participatory science resources for consideration by faculty facing a similar transition from group field activities to remote, individual field‐based experiences.

The forests of Costa Rica are rich in a wide variety of pollinator types and a very diverse flora that supports them.  Our research group from the University of California, Berkeley and Texas A & M University, College Station has been researching the ecology of one pollinator group, the bees, in the northwest Guanacaste dry forest region since 1969.  Much natural forest existed in this area when we first began the work.  But, many land use changes have occurred over the years to present day to the point that it is difficult to find tracts of undisturbed forest suitable for field research, especially those not affected by wildfires, which are now common.        Further, urban areas in the region continue to grow with increasing numbers of people populating the region.  In this paper we provide an overview of our past bee-flower work for a historical perspective, and then weave in people that have now become an obvious ecological component of current bee-flower relationships.  We also explore new questions that have become relevant through time, especially those related to researchers and potential conservation opportunities to share their stories with audiences that may extend their knowledge for practical use.  Finally, we propose that researchers plan to devote some of their precious time establishing relationships with people in conserving what is left of bee-flower relationships in urban environments in Guanacaste and beyond in the country.  Avenues for extending this knowledge are explored in this paper.

Experience and training in field work is a critical component of undergraduate education in ecology, and many university courses incorporate field-based or experiential components into the curriculum in order to provide students hands-on experience. Due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the sudden shift to remote instruction in the spring of 2020, many instructors of such courses found themselves struggling to identify strategies for developing rigorous field activities that could be completed online, solo, and from a student's backyard. This case study illustrates the process by which one field-based course, a UC California Naturalist certification course offered at the University of California, Davis, transitioned to fully remote instruction. The transition relied on established, publicly available, online participatory science platforms (e.g., iNaturalist) to which the students contributed data and observations remotely. Student feedback on the course and voluntary continued engagement with the participatory science platforms indicates that the student perspective of the experience was on par with previous traditional offerings of the course. This case study also includes topics and participatory science resources for consideration by other faculty facing a similar transition from group field activities to remote, individual field-based experiences.

Involving multiple stakeholders in conservation and natural resource management through participatory and collaborative approaches has been lauded as having great potential for achieving healthy and resilient social-ecological systems. Within these approaches, social learning has come to be understood as a key process that can support resilient systems by fostering trust and mutual understanding between stakeholders, bringing diverse types of knowledge into management schemes, and increasing the adaptive capacity of social-ecological systems so they are better equipped to accommodate change and disturbance. Yet, research on social learning with respect to conservation and natural resource management has thus far failed to consequentially attend to the intensive research and theoretical perspectives on learning from the learning sciences and educational research more broadly, perspectives that we argue can offer new insights to the social learning scholarship. Specifically, we synthesize and assess the value of sociocultural theories of learning to improve research on social learning processes and outcomes in the context of social-ecological resilience. Sociocultural learning theories help explain learning at both the individual and collective level, as well as the role of social, cultural, and historical contexts as constitutive components of learning. We argue that future studies of social learning should consider engaging with these theories to yield more rich and nuanced insights for the conservation and natural resource management fields with the goal of bolstering social-ecological resilience.