Addressing declining pollinator populations through new mathematics
March 30, 2026 – April 3, 2026
This workshop, sponsored by AIM and the NSF, will focus on advancing mathematical modeling frameworks and theory to address the urgent challenges posed by declining pollinator populations.
Insect pollination is vital to terrestrial ecosystems and agriculture, with honeybee pollination in the United States alone valued at over \$12 billion annually. Yet, substantial evidence shows that pollinator populations are in sharp decline, with honeybee colony losses reaching unprecedented levels â threatening agricultural sustainability and food security. These declines result from complex interactions among environmental factors (e.g., shifting climate patterns) and biological processes (e.g., exposure to agrochemicals such as insecticides and fungicides, parasitic infections, diseases, and habitat degradation).
Traditional models often struggle to represent the multiple, interacting factors operating across diverse spatial and temporal scales, and they frequently lack integration with empirical data for robust validation and parameterization. Addressing this complexity requires new mathematical approaches â particularly in dynamical systems, optimal control, reinforcement learning, and hybrid symbolicâdata-driven modeling â capable of capturing intricate feedbacks and guiding actionable solutions.
This workshop will bring together mathematicians, biologists, environmental scientists, and beekeepers to develop biologically realistic, predictive models that reflect the intricacies of pollinator health, especially honeybees. The program will focus on three main themes:
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Mathematical Modeling of Complex PollinatorâEnvironment Dynamics
- Develop high-dimensional, nonlinear, and non-smooth models capturing the interplay of environmental change, agrochemical exposure, disease, and habitat fragmentation.
- Incorporate delay differential equations, state-dependent delays, and stochastic processes to represent life stage transitions and environmental variability.
- Integrate spatially explicit PDEs and fractional diffusion models for pollinator movement in heterogeneous landscapes.
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Data-Driven Optimization and AI-Integrated Approaches
- Apply reinforcement learning, Bayesian inference, and deep neural networks to predict colony collapse thresholds and adaptive behaviors.
- Design real-time, data-informed management strategies for agrochemical application, parasite/disease control, and overwintering practices.
- Fuse multi-scale climate variability data, environmental metrics, and biological observations to improve model parameterization and predictive accuracy.
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Decision Support and Sustainable Management Strategies
- Develop optimal control frameworks to balance ecological resilience with agricultural productivity.
- Model synergistic effects of stressors to inform policy, conservation strategies, and precision beekeeping.
- Create transferable decision-support tools that connect model outcomes to stakeholder needs, from commercial beekeepers to policymakers.
This event will be run as an AIM-style workshop. Participants will be invited to suggest open problems and questions before the workshop begins, and these will be posted on the workshop website. These include specific problems on which there is hope of making some progress during the workshop, as well as more ambitious problems which may influence the future activity of the field. Lectures at the workshop will be focused on familiarizing the participants with the background material leading up to specific problems, and the schedule will include discussion and parallel working sessions.
For more information email workshops@aimath.org