Digital Twins – potentials and challenges in the context of honey bee vitality

DIGITAL TWINS - POTENTIALS AND CHALLENGES IN THE CONTEXT OF

HONEY BEE VITALITY

Oral Presentation at the World Biodiversity Forum - From Science To Action, Davos, Switzerland, 16-21 June 2024

J. Groeneveld 1), T. Martinovic 2), T. Rossi 3), V. Grimm 1)

1) Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ, Leipzig, Germany, 2) IT4Innovations,

VSB - Technical University of Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic, 3) CSC - IT Center for Science

Ltd, Espoo, Finland

Abstract:

Digital twins (DTs) are a virtual representation of real-world entities and processes that are

regularly updated with data from their real-world counterparts and trigger control inputs in

the real-world system. While originally developed for engineered systems, DTs are increasingly

being discussed for ecological systems. One example are pollinators such as honey bees (Apis

mellifera), which are exposed to multiple stressors such as pesticides, disease and land-use

change. It is therefore a long-standing goal to develop a robust understanding of how multiple

stressors affect the vitality of insect pollinators. We discuss the opportunities and challenges

of applying the DT approach to honey bees using the BEEHAVE honey bee colony model.

While there is a high potential to update the colony model with automatically measured data

from real colonies (e.g. colony weight, flight activity), it remains challenging to implement realtime

control measures from the model into the physical world. However, it has recently been

suggested that the feedback from the DT is more likely to influence the domain knowledge of

the stakeholder community and thereby stimulate, potentially delayed, changes in management

regimes. Nevertheless, an important positive side-effect of the development of DTs is the

improvement of model-data interaction.