Bee friendly plants - Anna Alfutina

Which plants are better for bees: native or non-native?

📖 Background

You work for the local government environment agency and have taken on a project about creating pollinator bee-friendly spaces. You can use both native and non-native plants to create these spaces and therefore need to ensure that you use the correct plants to optimize the environment for these bees.

The team has collected data on native and non-native plants and their effects on pollinator bees. Your task will be to analyze this data and provide recommendations on which plants create an optimized environment for pollinator bees.

💾 The Data

File: plants_and_bees.csv

Column	Description
`sample_id`	The ID number of the sample taken.
`bees_num`	The total number of bee individuals in the sample.
`date`	Date the sample was taken.
`season`	Season during sample collection ("early.season" or "late.season").
`site`	Name of collection site.
`native_or_non`	Whether the sample was from a native or non-native plot.
`sampling`	The sampling method.
`plant_species`	The name of the plant species the sample was taken from. None indicates the sample was taken from the air.
`time`	The time the sample was taken.
`bee_species`	The bee species in the sample.
`sex`	The gender of the bee species.
`specialized_on`	The plant genus the bee species preferred.
`parasitic`	Whether or not the bee is parasitic (0:no, 1:yes).
`nesting`	The bees nesting method.
`status`	The status of the bee species.
`nonnative_bee`	Whether the bee species is native or not (0:no, 1:yes).

import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
data = pd.read_csv("data/plants_and_bees.csv")
data

💪 Challenge

Which plants are preferred by native vs non-native bee species?
A visualization of the distribution of bee and plant species across one of the samples.
Select the top three plant species you would recommend to the agency to support native bees.

Q1: Which plants are preferred by native vs non-native bee species?

average_native_bees_per_plant = data[(data['nonnative_bee'] == 1) & (data['plant_species'] != 'None')].groupby('plant_species')['bees_num'].mean()
native_preferred_plants = average_native_bees_per_plant.sort_values(ascending=False)
native_preferred_plants

Top plants by native bee species

Daucus carota
Trifolium incarnatum

average_nonnative_bees_per_plant = data[(data['nonnative_bee'] == 0) & (data['plant_species'] != 'None')].groupby('plant_species')['bees_num'].mean()
nonnative_preferred_plants = average_nonnative_bees_per_plant.sort_values(ascending=False)
nonnative_preferred_plants

Top-10 plants by non-native bee species

Cichorium intybus
Rudbeckia hirta
Leucanthemum vulgare
Asclepias tuberosa
Rudbeckia triloba
Coronilla varia
Daucus carota
Cosmos bipinnatus
Chamaecrista fasciculata
Helenium flexuosum

Q2: A visualization of the distribution of bee and plant species across one of the samples.

list_of_plant_species = data['plant_species'][(data['plant_species'] != 'None')].unique()

for plant in list_of_plant_species:
    distribution = data[data['plant_species'] == plant].groupby('bee_species')['bees_num'].mean()
    plt.figure(figsize=(20, 10))
    plt.title('Distribution of Bee Species for the {}'.format(plant))
    plt.ylabel('Bee Species')
    plt.xlabel('Count')
    plt.barh(distribution.index, distribution.values, color='orange')
    plt.xticks(range(int(max(distribution.values)) + 1))
    
    plt.show()

Q3: Select the top three plant species you would recommend to the agency to support native bees.

Let's study the data on native bees

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