Pollinator Identification

Digital collection

All photos for this collection taken by Alexa Pudlo (Providence College UG ’22). Specimen collected at Westerly Land Trust (Westerly, RI) and Providence College (Providence, RI). Read more about how these specimen were collected here.

Visit Flickr to view/download original-sized photos. All photos under Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial license.

Printable guides, from our lab

Check back here as we will continue to add more guides.

Guides we like, from others

These are guides my students and I use both in the lab and the field. Some are printable, some are scrollable.

• Massachusetts Butterfly Club butterfly species list
• Tufts Pollinator Initiative general and species-specific pollinator guides (we especially love Nick’s Field Guide to Wild Bees!)
• U.S. Forest Service guide to bumble bees of the Eastern U.S.
• Vermont Atlas of Life wild bee guide

iNaturalist

iNaturalist is a place to record and organize observations from nature, meet other nature enthusiasts, and learn about the natural world. 

There are two ways to interact with iNaturalist:

• Seek, by iNaturalist allows you to use your phone camera to identify organisms (like insect pollinators and the plants they visit!) in real time. The identifications are powered by observations logged on iNaturalist, no personally identifiable information is collected.
• iNaturalist, an app and a website, is a bit more complicated. It allows you to post photos and crowd source species identifications. When you upload an observation, photo, location, and time are recorded in the iNaturalist database. Once you become an iNaturalist pro, you can also join projects (see below) and help scientists collect data!

Our iNaturalist Projects

• Providence Pollinators documents insect flower visitors on and around Providence College campus (Providence County, RI).
• Frosted Elfins of the Northeast helps us locate suitable sites for studying the rare frosted elfin butterfly.