Some 50% of the world’s population now lives in cities. By 2050, 68% of the world’s population will live in cities. By 2035 urban land is estimated to increase by 1.2 million km2, making urbanisation one of the greatest threats to biodiversity.
Scientists say that understanding the impact of the urbanisation process on biodiversity is one of the main priorities for preserving the functioning of natural ecosystems and the services they provide to humanity.
The World Bee Project can collect and analyse real-time bee data to measure
a city’s well-being, treating it as the ecosystem it is.
Data is evidence. Bee and hive data can be remotely generated, merged with local data, and studied to reveal how the local environment affects bee and pollinator health and is, in turn, affected by it.
Data allows us to understand bees in new ways,and create environments that enable pollinators and people to thrive.
Our evidence-based, data-driven approach encourages citizens and assists urban planners to view their cities in terms of urban influence on all types of life, including humans, plants, and pollinators and to focus on dimensions such as infrastructure, habitat, biodiversity, and urban productivity.

Visualisation of one of our data sets: Bee Social Network, based on 700,000 interactions recorded in a month. Bees with the most connections are shown in red, bees with fewer connections are further out in blue. Over 90% of interactions occurred less than three times. Regardless of the number of connections, bees focus more on making new connections rather than chatting to bees they already know.
