This article is also available in Italian / Questo articolo è disponibile anche in italiano

The buzzing of bees and bumblebees in a meadow on the outskirts of a large city; satellites in orbit thousands of miles above the earth's surface; a sustainability report on the desk of a European company. It sounds like the beginning of a science fiction movie or the plot of a charade.

Instead, it is a visual summary of the journey and activities – admittedly a bit sci-fi-esque – of 3Bee, the Italian nature-tech company with the mission of protecting biodiversity through the use of frontier technologies.

Founded in 2017 in order to develop a technology aimed at monitoring the health status of bees (Hive-Tech), the company founded by Niccolò Calandri and Riccardo Balzaretti soon broadened its scope to biodiversity as a whole, developing a series of systems for its monitoring, protection, and regeneration.

Until the October 2024 launch of a new tool aimed primarily at companies, but not exclusively: the 3Bee Environmental Platform, an integrated platform to report on Biodiversity, Climate, and Nature.

A project that connects all the dots, combining pollinator buzz detection with satellite data from the European Space Agency, to arrive at accurate and timely reports that enable companies or local governments to take effective action to protect biodiversity. To become, as the people at 3Bee like to say, Nature Positive.

How is biodiversity monitored?

All of 3Bee's work begins with a basic realisation: in order to protect and regenerate biodiversity, it is first necessary to have the most comprehensive, consistent, and accurate data possible on its status. Then we can talk about solutions and strategies, at the corporate, local government, nature park, and even national levels.

So the first step is to map, monitor and census. To achieve this, 3Bee combines the full range of systems and technologies currently available: from satellite data obtained through collaboration with ESA, to public databases, to censuses derived from field technologies developed by the company itself.

For example, Spectrum, which, as Communications Manager Lisa Santillo explains, “is an IoT sensor, works like an electronic ear that picks up the buzz of apoids, hoverflies and other pollinators, detecting their abundance and variety in a certain area.”

Pollinators (including bees, wasps, butterflies, and beetles) are a key category for mapping the surrounding biodiversity. “We use them as a descriptive proxy for biodiversity (a related variable that cannot be measured directly, editor’s note),” Daniele Valiante, agronomist and Biodiversity Strategist at 3Bee, tells us. “Their presence lets us know that there is plant diversity, and therefore a habitat not only for pollinators but also for large and small fauna.”

From the aggregation of data from the different sources, we then extract the MSA indicator, which is the average abundance of species in a given area: a European-recognised parameter that has several sub-indicators, including the MSA_LU or Land Use.

“Of all impact drivers, land use is the strongest regarding biodiversity,” Valiante explains. “Chemical pollution or water eutrophication brought by agriculture, for example, may vary over time, but land use is constant and radically influences the type of biodiversity in an area.”

The MSA_LU makes it possible to determine the degree of “naturalness” of an area, and 3Bee recently gave a demonstration of its effectiveness by drawing up a ranking of the “most natural” Italian cities: on the podium are Isernia, Belluno, and Savona, three provincial towns with extensive vegetation cover, a low level of anthropization and, indeed, almost intact biodiversity.

From monitoring to strategies

While the rankings are useful for advocacy, the data compiled by 3Bee has much more pragmatic and important purposes. In fact, it is the basis for the new Environmental Platform, which enables companies, municipalities, and other land use agencies to analyse their impacts on habitats and their dependencies on an area's ecosystem services in order to implement customised climate and biodiversity strategies.

Therefore, it starts with an assessment phase: thanks to 3Bee's platform, it only takes 15 minutes to get an accurate snapshot of the current state of an ecosystem, identifying the most critical areas that require urgent action.

“At this point it is possible to identify a strategy, some concrete regeneration actions”, Santillo explains. “And that is where our Biodiversity Strategist comes in, a specially trained technician who works alongside our partners and clients.”

More than 1,000 companies are already involved, and the platform has reached 17,000 monitored sites in 21 countries. Numbers that are destined to grow rapidly, thanks in part to the new European CSRD policy, which obliges companies to report on their impacts on climate and biodiversity, and especially on the effectiveness of the solutions they adopt. Because becoming Nature Positive takes more than declarations and good intentions: it takes data.

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