Robinson Sudan

After several years spent studying bee community ecology and working in pollinator conservation, I founded New Leaf in 2015 with a mission to promote habitat and ecological restoration, biodiversity conservation, and scientific research in Texas and the Southwest. My role with New Leaf, as its president and lead biologist, gives me the opportunity to bring together collaborators from both the public and private sectors, including research scientists, other non-profit groups, and government agencies. My five years as a science consultant for the Pollinator Partnership has not only given me the skills to work effectively with these different groups, it has also shown me the value of many viewpoints. I believe that when managed effectively, the diverse and varied perspectives among these partners leads to innovative projects with tangible applications for conservation action. As a bee biologist, I am most specifically interested in habitat use, resource distributions, and how landscape and geospatial factors influence community composition and species distributions. I hope to continue expanding our basic understanding of bee ecology in the tradition of the great naturalists and bee biologists of the 20th century. With the exception of the European honey bee (Apis mellifera), what we know of most bee species remains simply that they exist, and perhaps, if we're lucky, where they might be found. For such critically important animals, we know alarmingly little. Addressing this issue will be of the greatest importance for current and future generations of bee researchers.

February 2016