Lincoln Best, MSc

Lincoln is passionate about the biodiversity of native bees, their floral relations, restoring native plant communities, and land management for conservation. In BC he has documented nearly 600 species of native bees and has active research in many regions of the province. He collaborates with a full spectrum of stakeholders, instructs popular courses on these topics, and is a director for the Native Bee Society of British Columbia. Lincoln is a Pollinator Taxonomist in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Calgary, AB, where he provides taxonomic support to large-scale eco-agricultural landscape ecology research, urban ecology research in the City of Calgary, and restoration ecology research in prairie-agricultural contexts. At Oregon State University in Corvallis, OR, he is the Native Bee Taxonomist in the Faculty of Horticulture where he provides taxonomic support to the Oregon Bee Atlas, and generates biodiversity data for research in urban ecology, forest pollinator health, managed timber systems, genomics, metabarcoding, environmental farm management planning in various crop and orchard systems,and works with many other stakeholders and citizen scientists. In British Columbia, Lincoln strives to improve environmental decision-making in extractive industries in order to optimize biodiversity conservation at landscape scales.