We’ve always taken an instinctive approach to impact at Fabrix– putting people and nature at the heart of everything we do – but that doesn’t mean data collection and reporting isn’t equally important to us.

And what gets us really excited is when the two come together – when nature itself can help us understand, monitor and act. That’s exactly what we’re doing in a trailblazing pilot in Berlin where we’re using honey bees as biosensors to measure the health of the local ecosystem.

Working with social enterprise Stadtbienen (or City Bees) – one of our impact occupiers at Atelier Gardens – we’re installing a prototype smart beehive that cleverly analyses the pollen and nectar collected, as well as bee behaviour and health.

Located on the living roof of the recently-retrofitted entrance building to the campus HAUS 1, millions of data points will be collected daily delivering insights into key biodiversity drivers covering an area equal to 6,500 football fields – from food availability and variety, environmental toxicity and health, and the impact of human actions on local wildlife.

Together, we’ll be using the data to assess the impact of the radical regreening at Atelier Gardens over time and rolling the prototype out across projects in London too – allowing nature itself to give us a much more nuanced picture of the health of our ecosystems, that goes way beyond Biodiversity Net Gain and the Urban Greening Factor.