Measuring urban biodiversity
Overview
Bloom turns urban beehives into biodiversity sensors, giving property owners and cities a readable picture of how their green spaces are doing.
Background
Stadskupan installs and manages beehives on rooftops and courtyards across the city, alongside meadows, sand beds and insect hotels. The hives already produce local honey and support certifications like LEED and BREEAM. They also sit on something less obvious: honeybees range across parks, courtyards and rooftops, and what they carry back holds traces of everything they've flown past.
Bloom began as a concept in HIVE, Humblebee's student innovation program, and grew into a real product with Stadskupan. Today Bloom is funded by Formas, a Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development.
Challenge
Measuring urban biodiversity usually means manual surveys. They're slow, costly and hard to repeat, which makes it difficult to show change over time or point to where action is needed.
Solution
From an external lab, Bloom gets analyzed honey from the hives using eDNA, revealing which plant species grow within the bees flight range. Bloom turns that into maps, graphs and a single Bloom score per location, weighing species count, red-listed species and invasive species into one number from 0 to 10. You can compare locations and periods at a glance, then drill into what's driving a given score.
The score is decision support, not a complete inventory. It reflects what the bees gathered during one period and is read together with local knowledge. A low score flags where more flowering plants or action against invasive species would help. A high score confirms that existing conservation work is paying off. For Stadskupan, Bloom turns a network of hives into a monitoring service. For the people who own and manage green space, biodiversitbecomes something to track and act on rather than estimate.
Result
We led service design, UX and product design, from branding and design system to interface. We then built the web app and platform itself. In just a couple of months we helped Stadskupan build an entire brand with several digital products. Speed without loss of quality. For the better of mankind.
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