Mycelia in 2026: Biodiversity gain beyond “the Metric”

Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) is a game-changing innovation. Developed by the ecology community over more than a decade, it’s arguably the world’s first consistent and scalable data methodology for nature recovery. Not only is it helping to restore nature in the UK sectors where it is mandatory by law – expanding to include Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects this year – it is also rapidly spreading across sectors and countries.

However, BNG does have well-known limitations. It only encodes habitat types, conditions, and sizes, so it doesn’t integrate other data signals such as measurements of species via observations, acoustics, or eDNA. Without spatial information, it can’t take account of habitat connectivity, or other spatial data about the local site area.

This is why we built Mycelia so that it liberates BNG data from its limiting Excel format, and it’s why we’ve been expanding Mycelia to go beyond BNG. As its capabilities expand, Mycelia increasingly helps you to achieve more than BNG alone – whether that’s enhancing BNG projects using wider data and analyses, or supporting projects that aren’t based around BNG at all.

In 2025 Mycelia grew beyond BNG

In 2025, Mycelia gained:

• Red line boundary display – So you can see the exact location and extent of projects, and assess them in the context of their surroundings.
• Best-in-class aerial imagery – Bluesky’s high-resolution images are overlaid on exactly the right part of Earth’s surface, so you can be sure what’s inside or outside of the project boundary.‍
• Historical aerial imagery – Allowing you to “look back in time” to see how habitats have developed, or whether there has been any past clearance.‍
• AI analysis of ground-level photos – Providing an automatic sense-check of habitat types based on photos taken on-site, ensuring much more reliable results than aerial analysis.

This year has more in store

We’re working on lots of exciting new tools for 2026. Here are some examples:

• Automatic analysis of documents – Analysing nature project documentation (such as ecology reports, arboricultural reports, LEMPs, HMMPs, and monitoring reports), to link together data and flag opportunities and risks.
• Operationalising Local Nature Recovery Strategies  – Making data from LNRSs actionable. For example, automatic cross-referencing of development proposals with LNRS data and guidance.
• Making comprehensive site assessments easy – Automatically searching across many datasets and flagging up key points. For example, making sure you never miss a site feature, like a watercourse, even if it's not visible on aerial imagery.
• Changing how monitoring data is handled – Moving beyond shuttling PDF monitoring reports back and forth, so that the people generating the data share it directly with those who need it.

This is just the tip of the iceberg – we’re working on lots more.

Have your say

We’d love to hear your ideas and feedback.

Our plans are shaped by all the input we get, from our customers and from across the sectors we work in. Your suggestions could change the Mycelia roadmap!

If you’d like to get in touch, please email us on mycelia@verna.earth.

Thank you for all of the great input in 2025, and here’s looking forward to another game-changing year in 2026.

‍