The Inter-American Biodiversity Information Network (IABIN) has designated pollinator conservation as a major thematic area. Pollination is considered one of the most important processes for biodiversity conservation. Studies show that animal pollination can improve the amount and the quality of plant fecundation and fruit production, stimulating the use of animal pollination in environmental programs and proposals of sustainable agriculture. However, the success of these actions is based on the knowledge on pollinators, their conservation and interaction with the environment. New initiatives have been created to facilitate and to stimulate the dissemination of this knowledge.

One such initiative, the Pollinators Thematic Network (PTN), is being developed for the Americas and will link taxonomic and other content related to pollination. The Network will use established standards and protocols such as Species 2000/ITIS CoL, Darwin Core, ABCD, DiGIR, and TAPIR to link nomenclatural, specimen, and observation-related information. However, a novel approach is needed to enable the exchange of pollinator/plant interaction data. An extension to Darwin core is proposed to represent the interaction between specimens or observations in a broad sense, and a second extension is proposed to deal with specific pollinator/plant interactions. A prototype is being built to provide pollinator/plant data available from WebBee and other sources to the IABIN PTN portal based on the new proposed schemas.

The content from this network will link seamlessly to the GBIF network. A summary of progress will be presented as well as the proposed schemas to represent pollinator/plant interaction data.