Hectar is a 300-hectare regenerative agriculture and organic farm near Paris that strives to drive the social and economic shift toward regenerative agriculture by uniting the entire value chain—from farmers and entrepreneurs to startups, cooperatives, food manufacturers, and retailers. Bringing together hands-on field experience and practical innovation, Hectar delivers scalable solutions grounded in three core pillars: modeling, field testing, and knowledge sharing. Today, Hectar is: 300 hectares of polyculture-livestock pilot farm, targeted training and mentorship programs addressing key agricultural innovation challenges, and an impact-oriented seminar location with over 35,000 visitors hosted to date.

HECTAR is seeking and testing biodiversity monitoring solutions that could potentially outperform and scale faster than conventional monitoring approaches. Traditional surveys require multiple taxonomic specialists and precious time from farmers, and are limited in their ability to 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 evolutions 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 supporting the project, . The premise being explored is simple: can eDNA technology provide a  monitoring approach that farmers 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,