…a guest blog written by Alice Forget, Pollinators Project Officer at France based Noé Conservation. Noé has been working with Buglife Programmes Manager, Jamie Robins, to learn from the experience of establishing B-Lines in the UK.
In response to the decline of wild pollinators (estimated at 10,000 species in France, including 5,000 moth species), the NGO Noé is developing a French B-Lines inspired project called Trame Pollinisateurs. It is a mapping project to identify existing habitats that are important to wild pollinators, as well as potential ecological corridors. It also includes a collaborative approach to support local territories in implementing projects to restore their nature.
Trame Pollinisateurs represents one of the three pillars of the Renaturons! (Let’s Renature!) program launched by Noé at the end of 2024. Its objective is to build a replicable methodology to restore biodiversity in local areas, across all environments – urban, agricultural, and natural – by relying on concrete actions that mobilise citizens, local authorities, and economic stakeholders alike.
The initiative fits within the broader European Nature Restoration law, which has ambitions of “re-establishing biodiverse habitats on a large scale, and bringing back species populations by improving and enlarging their habitats (for wetlands, forests, grasslands, river and lakes, heath & scrub, rocky habitats and dunes)” and “reversing the decline of pollinator populations by 2030, and achieving an increasing trend for pollinator populations”.
- The first phase of the project in 2025 set out to develop and test a robust and replicable methodology based on several key steps:
Identifying and mapping key habitats and potential corridors within a given territory (départements); - Organising a local workshop to determine potential ecological connections, mobilise local stakeholders and encouraging them to take ownership of the issue and develop initiatives, including in urban areas;
- Implementing concrete locally appropriate actions;
- Measuring the impact of these actions on wild pollinators through the establishment of a monitoring network combining expert protocols and citizen science;
- Sharing and disseminating results through a dedicated digital platform.
The first participatory workshop was held on November 18, 2025, in Livry (Nièvre), organised by Noé and Allier Sauvage (a local organisation which aims to restore wild rivers). Around twenty-five local stakeholders – including farmers, beekeepers, local government staff, elected officials, forest managers, landscape architects, and local associations – worked together to identify environments favourable to pollinators (meadows, grasslands, clearings, hedgerow landscapes, and similar habitats) and to define priority areas for improving ecological connectivity.
This pilot workshop delivered very encouraging results, both in prioritising the sites to be restored and in identifying key actors, including a landscape architect ready to commit to coordinating the project locally.
In 2026, a technical committee for managing the Trame Pollinisateurs will be established in order to collectively decide, between Noé and stakeholders from the Nièvre area, on local governance arrangements for the projects to be carried out. Noé will reach out to a broad audience to gather information on existing or planned actions in support of pollinating insects.
The Trame Pollinisateurs project is supported by the French Ministry for Ecological Transition, in the aim to reach European Nature Restoration law targets and adapt the law to national level.
The overall ambition is to formalize / round off the methodology with national experts within 2026 and achieve full mapping by 2030.
About the Author:
Alice Forget holds a Master’s degree in Geography and Biodiversity from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She has always been passionate about nature and all living beings, and recently developed a strong interest in fostering local engineering approaches to help build resilient systems, including human communities.
She began her professional career at Noé, where she has been working for the past year on developing the methodology for the Trame Pollinisateurs. She continues this work in 2026, with the goal of finalizing and consolidating the methodology. She will then focus on another project within Noé: territorial facilitation in defined areas, aimed at building local action plans to support and enhance biodiversity. Connect with Alice on LinkedIn
About Noé:
Since 2001, the NGO Noé has been working in France and in Africa to protect nature, on the brink of collapse, and to leave a living and liveable planet to future generations.
Biodiversity is indeed in danger everywhere in the world. We speak of the 6th mass extinction. The causes of this collapse all result from human activity, and its consequences are felt everywhere in the world, even causing serious effects on livelihoods, the capacity to adapt to climate change, the economy, and the quality of life of human populations.
The destruction of nature thus threatens the survival of all humanity. Convinced that it is not too late to act and that, together, we can reverse biodiversity loss, we are one of the few French NGOs dedicated 100% to the protection of biodiversity, for the well-being of all living species, including the human species.
To achieve this, Noé develop three priority areas of action:
- Protect threatened species and their habitats – plants and animals are disappearing at an unprecedented rate. To reverse this vertiginous decline, we protect 2.9 million hectares of biodiversity of global importance. We develop species conservation programs, restoration of degraded ecosystems, scientific research activities, and wildlife monitoring…
- Act for a nature-positive economy – a transformation of our modes of production and consumption is essential to protect nature. We encourage economic stakeholders, in particular, to strengthen their practices in favor of nature conservation and to limit their impacts on ecosystems and the populations that depend on them.
- Reconnect humans with nature – increasingly urban, humans are losing their connection with nature. Because we better protect what we know, Noé enables individuals to learn about nature in order to better preserve it and become its ambassadors through its citizen science or environmental education programs