Bees as Living Sensors: How Ground-Truthed Biodiversity Analytics Can Restore Nature at Planetary Scale
Around the world, nature is declining faster than at any time in human history—yet our ability to measure ecological change on the ground remains surprisingly limited. Remote sensing provides broad signals, but what’s missing is the last mile: consistent, high-resolution, ground-truth data that captures what is actually happening to biodiversity, pollinators, and the landscapes that sustain us.
HiveTracks turns beekeepers, one of the world’s largest and most distributed communities of land stewards, into a global environmental monitoring network. By combining simple mobile tools, image-based plant and pollinator observations, beekeeping records, lab testing and analytics, HiveTracks transforms beehives and beekeepers into “living sensors” that capture the heartbeat of ecosystems. These data streams, including pollinator diversity, floral abundance, microplastic and chemical exposure, hive health, and landscape quality, feed models that help landowners, corporate sustainability teams, and governments understand environmental performance across habitats.
This talk will share how “Analytics for Good” becomes actionable when we embed people, local knowledge, and ecological relationships directly into data systems. You’ll learn how a statistically distributed network of hives can provide reliable biodiversity signals at scale, how companies use these insights to evaluate environmental outcomes, and how communities benefit through new revenue streams and nature-positive incentives.
Most importantly, this session will explore a new paradigm: where citizens, farmers, beekeepers, and digital tools collaborate to regenerate ecosystems—demonstrating that protecting nature can be both measurable and commercially viable.
HiveTracks shows that when analytics align with ecological truth on the ground, we can monitor, model, and ultimately restore the natural world.
Essential /
Professional /
Leadership
