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Cabrillo National Monument

Bee Trends Explorer 📈

by Brandi Sanchez

Pick a bee to see how its share of the park’s bee photos has moved from year to year. Solid lines are one species, dashed lines a whole genus.

Six seasons is not a trend. These are shares of each year’s photos, not population counts, and six points cannot show a direction either way. Watch 2024 especially, because that season recorded roughly twice as many bees per survey parkwide, so a line rising into 2024 is usually showing the season rather than the bee.
What is on this page. iNaturalist photo records only, 2021 through 2026, parkwide, every observer and every month. Photos only, because specimen netting ran just 2021 to 2023 and mixing methods would make net-friendly bees look like they were vanishing. Share rather than raw counts, because surveying grew so much that counts would mostly measure the surveying. A bee appears once it has 50 records or more, and 2026 is still in progress, so its last point is drawn open. Direction tested with a Spearman rank correlation of annual share against year. Source: iNaturalist observations, Cabrillo National Monument (data as of 2026-09-14).

Where this is headed: with more years, the honest way to measure a trend is a model that lets each transect have its own story while still estimating one shared direction, rather than a single line through everything. That approach is described in Schirmer, Fritze and Scheuerlein (2026), Ecological Indicators 183:114588. Our four fixed transects are already the right structure for it. What we need now is seasons.