Bumblebee queen mortality along roads increase with traffic - Bumblebee queen mortality and behaviour along roads with varying traffic and road verges with contrasting flowering plant diversity

This study makes part of the research project GINFRA – green rights-of-way infrastructure for biodiversity and ecosystem services. The aim of the project was to quantify whether linear infrastructure habitats (road verges and power-line corridors) support biodiversity by assessing the influence of the area of these habitats in the landscape, their contribution to landscape connectivity and population persistence. The linked data was collected by surveying bumblebee queens during the spring and late summer in 20 sites in Uppland, Sweden. The sites were paired such that half of them had a high flowering plant diversity in the road verge and a gradient in traffic intensity from ~100 to ~6000 vehicles per day, and the other half had a similar gradient in traffic intensity but low flowering plant diversity in the road verge (i.e. regular grass dominated road verges). The surveyor walked a 2 km transect (1 km in each side of the road) and recorded all dead and alive bumblebee queens. The data set consists of 403 observations. Each observation corresponds to an observed bumblebee queen, whether they were found dead or alive and what behaviour they presented when observed. The data was gathered in 4 visits, 2 in spring and 2 in the late summer. Weather information is also present in the dataset, as well as information regarding the average width of the road verge. The data file Queen_mortality_and_behaviour.csv contains 403 rows and 12 columns. See the general description and the documentation file for more information.