Same 200m walk, same 10am–2pm window, same six urban sites — from a fenced community garden to a highway median planting.
Zero-count observations are recorded with the same rigor as sightings, so absence carries real weight in the model.
Every specimen photo gets a second call from Dr. Cho's lab before a species label is locked into the dataset.
Regional counts are falling — three consecutive citywide surveys point the same direction, but at a resolution too coarse to explain why.
Existing surveys sample once a year at the city scale, so they can't tell a fenced pocket garden from a highway median — the two ends of the urban gradient get averaged together.
That means no one can say whether it's plant diversity, paved cover, or something else driving the decline.
Across the six sites, pollinator visits per ten-minute observation fall from an average of 14 in early May to about 5 by mid-July — and the paved, high-traffic sites lead the decline.
Walk the 200m transect once to flag flowering patches and set fixed observation points.
Ten-minute timed counts at each point, recording every visit and species where identifiable in the field.
Net and photograph unclear specimens for lab confirmation; release healthy insects on site.
Dr. Cho's lab cross-checks every photographed specimen before a species label is locked in.
Counts feed a generalized linear model with impervious cover and bloom diversity as predictors.
From a fenced community garden to a highway median planting, spanning the full paved-to-planted gradient.
Every photographed specimen cross-checked in Dr. Cho's lab before its species label was locked in.
Pollinator visits per ten-minute count fell from 14 to about 5 at the most paved sites.
This is the first dataset from our program to actually separate pavement cover from bloom diversity — that's a real methodological contribution, not just a nice survey.
Impervious surface cover — not bloom diversity — is the strongest predictor of pollinator decline at these six sites. More paved cover means fewer visits, independent of how many flowering species were present.
Manuscript draft due to Dr. Cho by June 1; targeting the campus journal's fall issue.
Poster session, May 22 — same six-site figure and GLM, condensed to a three-foot board.
Limitation: one growing season, six sites, a single city — the next cohort repeats the transects to test if the pattern holds.