HECTAR is a 300-hectare regenerative agriculture research site near Paris, serving as a campus and startup accelerator dedicated to training entrepreneurs, piloting agtech innovations, and advancing sustainable farming practices across Europe. Its role is part demonstration farm, part living lab: everything trialled on site, from soil health interventions to biodiversity monitoring itself, gets tested at real farm scale, then reported back to the community of farmers, technicians, researchers, and corporate partners funding the sector's transition to regenerative methods.

HECTAR are seeking and testing biodiversity monitoring solutions that can outperform and scale faster than conventional monitoring approaches. Traditional surveys require multiple taxonomic specialists, run slowly, and don't scale, especially as corporate partners face growing pressure to report against CSRD, SAI and TNFD.  

As HECTAR put it, they wanted "an accessible, reliable, and scalable approach to measuring changes in biodiversity at the farm level, with a view to lending credibility to, and directing, funding for biodiversity restoration on agricultural land."

NatureMetrics deployed one integrated eDNA campaign across the full 300 hectares, aquatic eDNA from the ponds, airborne/surface eDNA for mammals and birds, invertebrate pan traps, and a pollinator surface-swab trial, built to be repeatable at scale.  

HECTAR's own team collected the samples; swabbing flowers for pollinator DNA needed no taxonomic training and no invasive handling. Results landed on the NatureMetrics Intelligence Platform alongside remote-sensing Habitat Insights within 8 weeks, ready for trend analysis, moving the data from the lab bench to the farm manager's dashboard.

The survey documented 152 species, including 24 IUCN Red List species and 2 invasive species. Standout finds included the Vulnerable Reeves's Pheasant, confirming the site as a refuge for sensitive wildlife, and an early flag on the invasive Spotted Wing Drosophila before it became a yield problem.

A full-farm biodiversity baseline, collected by non-specialists and investor-ready in 8 weeks, is a methodology other sites can actually adopt. That's the case HECTAR is now making to the corporates funding the regenerative transition, L'Oréal, Nestlé, and LVMH among them. The message is simple: eDNA technology can provide a  monitoring approach they can run themselves, at scale, with evidence rigorous enough to direct real capital. One farm's baseline is becoming the template for how regenerative agriculture gets measured, proven, and funded.

In collaboration with: HECTAR, alongside fellow assessment partners Synature, Beeodiversity and GENESIS, and corporate stakeholders including L'Oréal, Nestlé and LVMH.