Pollinators, particularly bees, play a critical role in maintaining biodiversity and supporting agricultural productivity. However, in many regions of Africa, including Rwanda, there is a significant lack of spatial data on bee diversity, distribution, and habitat conditions. This limits the ability to design effective conservation strategies and monitor pollinator populations.

This presentation demonstrates how QGIS is being applied as a practical and accessible tool to support field-based ecological research on bee diversity in Rwanda. The project integrates field data collection, including species observations, habitat characteristics, and GPS coordinates, with geospatial analysis to produce distribution maps and identify key pollinator habitats across different ecosystems such as wetlands, forests, and agricultural landscapes.

The workflow highlights the use of QGIS for data visualization, mapping species occurrence, and analyzing habitat pressures. It also explores how open-source GIS tools can support conservation planning, especially in resource-limited contexts. Challenges encountered during field data integration and mapping are discussed, along with opportunities for improving data quality and scaling up the approach.

This talk is aimed at end users and early-stage practitioners interested in applying QGIS to biodiversity conservation, and it demonstrates how geospatial tools can bridge the gap between field research and actionable environmental management.