On 23–24 May 2024, the symposium ‘New solutions to monitor plants, pollinators and their interactions in a changing world’ was held at the Collège de France and the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris. The meeting brought together scientists to assess the state of plant and pollinator monitoring schemes in Europe and to consider how these could be improved, extended and coordinated.

Discussions addressed the limitations of current approaches, which often rely on opportunistic occurrence data. While valuable for large-scale patterns, these data are less effective for detecting short-term trends or evaluating conservation policies, and they rarely include both plants and pollinators. Systematic plot-based surveys provide more robust information but remain scarce in most countries, except in Switzerland and the UK.

Participants reviewed existing schemes, compared the trends and indicators they produce, and outlined future needs. These included expanding the number of monitored plots, species and habitats, increasing the involvement of citizen scientists, using new identification technologies, coordinating plant and pollinator sampling, and developing statistical tools to integrate diverse datasets.

Read more here.