As a young economist, Max Rünzel joined the United Nations wanting to change the world – fast.
Within a year, however, he was disillusioned. “I think I could have changed the world with the UN. I’m not sure how fast I could have done it,” he says.
Instead, Rünzel turned his attention to a talk by American professor James Wilkes, who demonstrated how data from bees could help meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Wilkes, a computer scientist and beekeeper, had built a tool to track hive activity.
From UN idealism to bee-powered data
Rünzel approached him and, together with co-founder Laura Dye, turned that concept into HiveTracks – a start-up using bees as a way to monitor an entire ecosystem’s health.
Refering to itself as “a group of nature nerds and builders making biodiversity data actually useful”, today, the company operates in around 150 countries, working with 20,000 beekeepers and more than 100 organisations to “quantify what hasn’t been quantified”.
“I thought this was like an invisible force that nobody talks about, everybody is kind of scared of, but everybody depends upon it,” explains Rünzel.
He sat down with AgNavigator to explain how he believes HiveTracks can change the world – and quickly.
Two tools, one ecosystem view
AN: What exactly does HiveTracks do?
It primarily does two things. It has a network of almost 20,000 beekeepers around the world, and for them it’s really an inspection tool. They use it to understand what drives the health of their hive and what needs to be done to keep them healthy.
Then at the same time, we have a different tool that allows people to manage habitats by monitoring the diversity and abundance of pollinators and plants.
These two together, we offer to companies, either as data collection or as a software tool, so they can really understand how they are making progress toward environmental goals.
AN: What kind of companies?
Primarily in the built environment and agrifood. That could be solar, a new housing development, or anything that impacts farmland.
We are trying to ensure the long-term value and resilience of the land stays intact. And we do that by looking at the bee health and the relationship between hive health and habitat health.
Bees as biosensors
AN: So bees are a proxy for broader ecosystem health?
Exactly. We’re thinking of the hive like a biosensor. The bees forage about 10,000 acres, which is basically the monitoring area.
AN: What’s the main motivation for someone to use HiveTracks?
For a beekeeper, they want to know what’s happening and want to get recommendations based on what they’re seeing in the hive. ‘I have low population, low food stores, I want to know what to do next.’
From a construction company or a supply chain company, there’s usually one of three reasons. One is that you’re already doing something, and you want to market it. So you’re already spraying less, you’re already planting, you’re already doing something with your habitats that you can’t yet market efficiently, because you don’t have the data to tell the story.
The second reason is that it’s time to generate revenue or to unlock premiums. More and more land developers are having trouble being able to buy new land because the landowner says: ‘If I’m going to lease this to you for 75 years, how are you going to prove to me that the value of the land isn’t deteriorating?’
And number three, there’s more and more municipal requirements, like tree removal schedules, BNG [biodiversity net gain] in the UK. There are so many of these aspects where people say, okay, you need to track the environmental or biodiversity impacts of what you do.
Turning data into decisions – and value
AN: And there’s a more intelligent aspect to it than just data collection?
Exactly. Companies want to know which practices across their farms have the biggest impact on the environment and how shifting management practices improves habitat quality. That’s what intrigues the larger companies.
AN: And then what do you do with that insight?
Ultimately, a marketplace. We want to be able to monetise changes in nature by allowing people to hedge against changes in nature. So are we able to predict drought? Are we able to predict changes in land use? Are we able to make large-scale recommendations on a policy or country level that can really move the needle and create more resilient ecosystems?
From insight to action
Also for recommendations: what can you do to increase drought tolerance or nitrogen fixation? Can you plant something? Can you adjust your mowing strategy? And then we will be able to see what is the biggest bang for the buck to create better ecosystems. What actually moves the needle from a habitat health perspective, at scale and in what region?
AN: And is the current move towards more regenerative and sustainable farming enough?
We’re too early to make a large-scale assessment of it. Those are our first groups of customers because they came to us and said: ‘Hey, we’ve been doing this for two or three years, but we can’t prove it and so we can’t really tell the story. Help us.’
Unlocking biodiversity markets
AN: In the UK, where the post-Brexit subsidy system is about rewards for environmental benefits, will this help farmers access subsidies because they can now quantify it?
That’s the goal. We’ve set up the entire data collection procedure as fully auditable. We collect data with a smartphone. These are images that are taken of plants and pollinators. Every image is time-stamped, location-stamped, and elevation-stamped.
And then we have AI tell us what kind of species it is, and we have a human in the loop to validate whether it really is the species or not. So this kind of end-to-end auditability sets us up to comply with any kind of subsidy system that we’re looking at.
