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  • Projects and activities | Last updated: 27 Mar 2025
STING+: Science and Technology for Pollinating Insects Plus
Biodiversity Knowledge Centre
Bees gather pollen from flowers

Context

The decline in the abundance and diversity of European wild insect pollinators constitutes a dramatic issue for both biodiversity protection and food security due to the crucial role of pollination in the propagation of many plant species. To provide a framework for a coherent tackling of pollinators decline across the European Union, in 2018 the European Commission adopted the EU Pollinators Initiative (EUPI) revised in 2023 (COM(2023) 35) as A New Deal for Pollinators . The Initiative sets out objectives as well as long- and short-term actions under three priorities: i) Improving knowledge of pollinator decline, its causes and consequences; ii) Improving pollinator conservation and tackling the causes of their decline and iii) Mobilising society and promoting strategic planning and cooperation at all levels.

The Joint Research Centre (JRC), with the support of a pool of top pollinator experts, has been closely involved in the implementation of the EUPI since 2019, providing critical scientific input for developing methodological options for an EU Pollinator Monitoring Scheme (EU PoMS) and associated indicators. Two JRC technical reports have been published to date resulting from this work: “Proposal for an EU Pollinator Monitoring Scheme” (Potts et al. 2021) and “Refined proposal for an EU Pollinator Monitoring Scheme” (Potts et al., 2024).

The adoption of the Nature Restoration Regulation (NRR) in 2024 provided a new impetus to the setting up of an EU PoMS. Article 10 of the NRR stipulates that Member States shall reverse the decline of pollinator populations by 2030 and achieve thereafter an increasing trend. Article 10 foresees also the adoption of a standardised approach for collecting annual data on the abundance and diversity of pollinator species and for assessing pollinator population trends.

STING+ and new expert pool 

To meet this renewed ambition, in the context of a new project named STING+, the JRC was tasked by the Directorate-General for Environment (DG-ENV) to mobilize high-level experts covering different aspects of the monitoring scheme to be set in place as well as the refinement of a pollinator indicator that should support the assessment of the legally binding target. For this, a new expert pool was established in 2024: SIMPOLL (Sampling strategy, Indicators and Monitoring methodology for EU POLLinators).

The specific objectives of SIMPOLL are: 

  1. To enhance the methodological foundations of the EU PoMS, that will integrate the provisions of the NRR, particularly for what concerns:
    1. Indicators, power analysis and costs associated to capacity building and implementation
    2. Sampling strategy and methods
  2. To provide technical and scientific advice to the Commission and Member State authorities involved in the preparation and deployment of national pollinator monitoring schemes, in the context of the implementation of obligations under NRR’s Article 10.

DISCLAIMER: Until the adoption of the delegated acts established under the provisions of the articles 10, 21 and 22 of the NRR, the SIMPOLL experts are providing solely to the Commission their technical and scientific advice.

List of experts in SIMPOLL
Name Profile overviewMain affiliation
Ignasi BartomeusIgnasi Bartomeus is a community ecologist interested in understanding how global change drivers impact community structure and composition, and how these impacts affect ecosystem functioning. He likes to work with plant-pollinator communities because they show complex responses to land use change, climate warming and biological invasions, and because they encapsulate a critical ecosystem function, pollination.Estación Biológica de Doñana (EBD-CSIC) (ES)
Aurelien BesnardAurelien Besnard works at the interface of population dynamics, ecological statistics and conservation biology. He has developed regular collaborations between field practitioners and stakeholders and biostatisticians that develop methods for population monitoring and population dynamic modelling. His work comprises estimating demographic parameters mainly for endangered species in the context of conservation plans, estimating the impact of perturbations or habitat alterations on these species and evaluating and building monitoring protocols for endangered species.Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE) (FR)
Jordi BoschJordi Bosch is a bee and pollination ecologist whose research interests comprise plant-pollinator interactions, the role of local and landscape factors on the spatial distribution of pollinator communities, crop pollination and bee ecotoxicology amongst others. He is part of key European research projects focused on pollinating insects, including SPRING (Strengthening Pollinator Recovery through INdicators and monitorinG) and RestPoll.CREAF, Autonomous University of Barcelona (ES)
Tom BreezeTom Breeze is an ecological economist whose research interests include the social and economic benefits of biodiversity, ecosystem service management, public attitudes towards wildlife, conservation policy, and crop pollination. His work focuses on the human impacts (economic, social and health) of biodiversity loss and the barriers and incentives around conservation, monitoring and education. He is particularly interested in insect pollinators and natural pest regulation.University of Reading (UK)
Ana CasinoAna Casino is an economist, with a professional background devoted mainly to the organization and management of public agencies and enterprises. She was the director of the Atlantic Botanic Garden of Gijón (Spain) for over 10 years, whilst nowadays she is the General Secretary of the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF), which is Europe’s network of biological and geological collections. CETAF comprises 81 institutions representing the major National Natural History and Natural Science Museums, Botanic Gardens and other Research Centers on Biodiversity.Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) (BE)
Victor CazalisVictor Cazalis is a biodiversity conservation scientist, with particular interests in international conservation, conservation effectiveness, IUCN Red List and birds. After five years in academia, he is now supporting applied projects from NGOs, researchers, or public agencies to make conservation science methods and outputs more accessible.Founder and principal consultant at Conservara (Conservation Analyst for Research Application) (FR)
Petra DiekerPetra Dieker is a landscape ecologist whose research interests include biodiversity monitoring in agricultural landscapes and the development of citizen science and non-lethal sampling and recording methods for pollinators and their drivers of change. She has worked on the development of a nationwide bumblebee monitoring scheme, and on trend analysis and indicators for wild bee populations in agricultural landscapes.Agricultural Landscapes and Biodiversity - Agroscope (CH)
Axel HochkirchAxel Hochkirch is a conservation biologist whose interests span all kinds of biodiversity research, including its evolution (phylogenetic, phylogeography, evolutionary ecology, and biogeography), its dynamics (behavioural biology, ecology, and population genetics) and its conservation (conservation biology, conservation genetics). His main interest is insect conservation. He is chair of the IUCN SSC Invertebrate Conservation Committee and Co-Chair of the IUCN SSC Grasshopper Specialist Group.Luxembourg National Museum of Natural History (LU)
Nick IsaacNick Isaac is a macroecologist and studies how biodiversity is distributed in space, how it is changing over time, and how we measure it. His research combines statistical analysis with the development of tools for making robust inferences from noisy data. Most of his research is based on terrestrial invertebrates in the UK, using data gathered by volunteer citizen scientists.UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UK)
Francesca ManciniFrancesca Mancini is an ecological modeller and uses citizen science data to understand patterns of biodiversity change. She uses statistical models to derive trends in species distribution from biological records data and investigate the impacts of environmental change. Francesca is also a NERC Knowledge Exchange fellow, working with partners in conservation NGOs, government agencies and Environmental Records Centres to make quantitative methods for producing biodiversity assessments available to a non-technical audience.UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UK)
Denis MichezDenis Michez is Professor of Botany, Entomology and Systematics. He develops studies to globally understand bee diversity and conservation. His PhD field background is Systematics. He has published species descriptions, phylogenies and monographies. He is leading projects exploring how bee diversity evolved at population and upper taxonomic levels (species, families) considering fossils, molecular phylogenies, phylogeography and bee-plant chemical interactions. He is also developing research focusing on emergent global threats like climate change and chemical pollution.University of Mons (BE)
Matteo MontagnaMatteo Montagna is an entomologist specialized in the systematics, evolution, and ecology of various insect groups, as well as plant-insect-microbiota interactions. Recently, he has expanded his research to the community level, investigating biodiversity associated with human-influenced ecosystems by adopting DNA barcoding and metabarcoding. Additionally, he explores species-level diversity through population genomics approaches.University of Naples Federico II (IT)
Bas OtemanBas Oteman is an ecologist whose research interests focus mainly on combining ecology with technology, for example by using satellite data to address ecological issues. His main expertise concerns butterflies, computer programming and image recognition, data processing, management and validation, statistical analyses and geographic information systems (GIS), as well as remote sensing.Dutch Butterfly Conservation (NL)
Simon PottsSimon Potts is Professor of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. His research focuses on the links between land use, biodiversity and ecosystem services using a combination of natural, social and economic science approaches. Much of his work looks at ways of reconciling the conflicting demands of food production and biodiversity conservation, with research outcomes aimed at developing evidence-based mitigation options for policy and management applications.University of Reading (UK)
Marino QuarantaMarino Quaranta is an entomologist specializing in the taxonomy, biology, and ecology of wild bees. His research explores bee biodiversity at multiple scales and changes in pollination dynamics in both crops and wild plants. He investigates the factors influencing local species composition and the structure of wild bee food networks, while also assessing their role as indicators of environmental quality. For over a decade, he has been teaching introductory courses on wild bee identification.Council for Agricultural Research and Economics (IT)
Santos RojoSantos Rojo is Professor of Entomology. His research focuses on the biology and ecology of dipteran flies: from studying their diversity and their role in natural and non-natural ecosystems to investigating how flies (mainly hoverflies and blowflies) interact with other organisms. He is also interested in life cycle, and insect rearing techniques (including mass production) for applied purposes. He has been involved in key European projects on pollinators, such as SPRING and the ongoing EPIC-Fly (European Pollinator Identification Courses of Hoverflies).University of Alicante, Department of Environmental Sciences & Natural Resources (ES)
David RoyDavid Roy is Professor of Ecology at the University of Exeter and the Head of the Biological Records Centre UKCEH. He leads the UKCEH contribution to the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (UKBMS) and co-ordinates the European Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (eBMS) partnership. His research spans biological recording, citizen science, and biological impacts of climate change. His work focuses on the use of large-scale and long-term datasets on the distribution and abundance of species to understand and predict the effects of environmental change on biodiversity.UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UK); University of Exeter (UoE)
Marco ScarnòMarco Scarnò is a Senior Statistician and Data Scientist, expert in Big and Small Data analysis, sampling, modelling, data validation and data quality, editing and imputation of Census data, outlier detection. He was an external professor of Statistics at the University of Rome “Sapienza” and has been involved in international projects for Organizations like Eurostat, the European Commission, and UNESCO. He coordinated the FAO Big Data Laboratory from its foundation in 2019 until 2024, and today he works as a consultant for the public and private sectors.Statistical consultant (IT)
Oliver SchweigerOliver Schweiger is an animal ecologist with a fondness for insects (especially carabid beetles, wild bees, hoverflies and butterflies). His research covers many aspects of biodiversity and thus the analysis of the structure, dynamics and functions of ecological systems across a variety of temporal and spatial scales. He seeks to understand the effects of systematic variations in environmental conditions such as that of global change on functional, phylogenetic and taxonomic aspects of species assemblages, as well as on species interactions and the provisioning of ecosystem services.Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ (DE)
Mark van NieuwstadtMark van Nieuwstadt is an ecologist and project manager with a strong background in biodiversity and pollinator conservation. His main areas of expertise are the ecological sciences and making biodiversity data usable and accessible for societal purposes. He is currently participating in two European research projects that focus on the financing (BIOFIN-EU) and implementation (Commit2Green) of Nature-based Solutions. He has participated in the European project SPRING (Strengthening Pollinator Recovery through INdicators and monitorinG), leading the taxonomic capacity building task.Naturalis Biodiversity Center (NL)
Chris van SwaayChris van Swaay is a biologist who has specialized in the ecology and conservation of butterflies. Since 1990 he has co-ordinated the Dutch Butterfly Monitoring Scheme. He is a leading author on some of the major overviews on butterflies in Europe, including the Red List of European Butterflies in 2010 and 2025. Together with Butterfly Conservation Europe (BCE) partners, he developed European indicators on Grassland butterflies (GBI) as well as a European Butterfly Climate Change Indicator.Dutch Butterfly Conservation (NL)
Ante VujicAnte Vujic is an entomologist whose research focuses on biodiversity, conservation and taxonomy of Syrphidae in particular. He teaches a number of courses in Environment and Conservation Biology at the University of Novi Sad, Department of Biology and Ecology. He has developed a large cooperation network and he is principal investigator in several international and national research projects.University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Sciences, Department of Biology and Ecology (RS)
Jie ZhangJie Zhang is a spatial analyst and data manager. Her research interests focus on geospatial data processing, analysis, modelling, and visualization, environmental data and geo-data management, GIS and WebGIS, and web development.Biocentre, University of Würzburg (DE)

 

For questions regarding STING+ or SIMPOLL, please contact the JRC POMS team: JRC-POMS@ec.europa.eu