Wild bees of Chile: a database on taxonomy, sociality, and ecology.

Bees are a diverse group of insects that have tremendous importance as pollinators. In the last decades, there was a global decline in bee populations due to land-use change, intensive agriculture, and climate change. Unfortunately, our knowledge of native bees' ecology is rather scarce, and such knowledge gaps are also a major threat to its conservation. In this sense, biological collections are a priceless natural history legacy and an information source for new research and decision-making. Chile has a remarkable bee diversity, with 464 species currently known from Chile and a high incidence of endemism and a variety of habitats (including the Mediterranean biodiversity hotspot). The largest wild bee in Chile is held at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (comprising a century of data). This collection has been recently included in GBIF. Here we present a database with 36,010 records, including information on sociality and ecology (including information on floral visitation range, the resource collected, and nesting substrates) for 160 out of the 167 bee species included (36% of the Chilean bee diversity, including 49 genera and five families). All records have the taxonomy resolved, and 83% of them have geographic coordinates, covering a latitudinal range between 18 and 53 ºS from the continental and insular territories. This data set is released for non-commercial use only. Credits should be given to this paper (i.e., proper citation), and the products generated with this database should be shared under the same license terms (CC BY-NC-SA). This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.