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.