Location intelligence for urban green infrastructure —
bridging the blind spot between satellite data and on-the-ground reality
Founded
2025
Location
Bristol, UK
Stage
Pre-seed / TRL 6
Track
Risk & Resilience
urbanbiome.co.uk
The UK cannot measure whether urban greening is working
A nationally recognised data gap with no existing solution
Top-down
Satellite Remote Sensing
10–30m resolution · cloud gaps · misses small-scale GI
?
The Monitoring Gap
No national dataset for urban GI condition. No tool to track what exists or how it's performing.
Bottom-up
Professional Ecology Surveys
£300+/day · annual at best · cannot scale to 30-year monitoring
"UNABLE TO EVALUATE"
How the Climate Change Committee scored the UK's urban greening progress in its 2025 Report to Parliament.
CCC Adaptation Progress Report, 2025
67%
of UK urban forests have no proactive management
0.66
average ecologists per local planning authority
75%
tree mortality rate in some urban planting schemes
URBAN BIOME
2 / 11
Public realm GI is invisible to every existing framework
Development sites have BNG obligations. Everything between them has nothing.
Dev Site BNG covered
Street verges
Dev Site BNG covered
Planters & pocket parks
Street trees
Shared areas
Dev Site BNG covered
Hedges & green walls
Dev Site BNG covered
Covered by BNG / planning conditions
No framework. No monitoring. No data.
What existing frameworks cover
BNG development sites · Planning conditions ·
TPOs · Conservation areas
What they miss
Street verges and grass areas
Planters, raised beds, window boxes
Street trees outside TPOs
Community-maintained green spaces
Hedges along footpaths
Green walls and vertical planting
De facto pocket parks
The most-walked spaces are the worst served.
We discovered this pattern by exploring OS NGD Sites — the planning polygons cover developments but miss everything between them.
URBAN BIOME
3 / 11
Two data layers that see what neither can alone
Satellite catches systemic decline. Community catches what satellites miss.
Both platform components in production with real users. Not a concept — a working system.
143
GI assets documented
6
volunteer observers
17
infrastructure types
13
environmental layers
4
vegetation indices per sighting, monthly
TRL 6
both components in production
Sightings — Ground Truth
Citizen GI monitoring app. Photo upload, AI species ID, GPS auto-extraction, land ownership lookup, satellite vegetation monitoring per asset, issue tracking + resolution.
Explorer — Remote Sensing
Environmental stress mapping. 13 satellite/open data layers at property resolution. Point-click analysis. Urban heat, air quality, vegetation, flood risk, noise, drought.
FixMyStreet Pro charges councils: District: £5–7k/yr Unitary: £15–56k/yr For citizen-reported potholes.
GI monitoring with satellite intelligence is worth at least equivalent pricing.
Cost comparison
One ecologist: £35–45k/yr Urban Biome: citywide coverage for less
Network effects
Each new city adds community data. Community data makes the dashboard more valuable. More value attracts more councils. Flywheel.
URBAN BIOME
8 / 11
The only platform combining citizen science with satellite for urban GI
Competitors do one layer well. Nobody integrates both for the public realm.
Capability
Urban Biome
Verna
iNaturalist
Gentian
Consultancies
Satellite environmental monitoring
✓
✗
✗
✓
✗
Citizen ground-truth data
✓
✗
✓
✗
✗
Continuous monitoring (not point-in-time)
✓
✗
✗
✗
✗
Urban / public realm focus
✓
✗
✗
✗
Varies
Land ownership integration
✓
✗
✗
✗
✗
Scalable council pricing
✓
✓
Free
£/ha
£10k+/project
Verna / Linckia
BNG compliance on development sites via paid ecologists. Administrative case management. Complementary — different market.
iNaturalist
Species observations only. No condition tracking, no satellite monitoring, no institutional output.
Gentian / AiDash
Satellite habitat mapping. Point-in-time assessment, no ground-truth layer, no community data.
They monitor development sites. We monitor the actual infrastructure in between.
URBAN BIOME
9 / 11
One builds the tech. One opens the doors.
We identified this problem from opposite sides and arrived at the same conclusion.
RF
Reuben Forster
Co-founder / Technical Lead
15 years in construction and landscaping showed him green infrastructure is planted then forgotten. Watched trees die from neglect. Saw the same patterns repeat.
GIS consultant (Ecolazy) · Designer (Heatherwick Studio)
Built the entire platform: Python, Rust, React/Svelte, Cloudflare serverless
Full-time commitment
MD
Manon Dangelser
Co-founder / Strategy & Stakeholder Lead
10 years advising councils on climate resilience at Arup showed her why they can't monitor GI: no budget, no data, no staff. Knows the institutional barriers from the inside.
Explorer and Sightings are working components. Geovation funds the integrated product.
💷
£20k Funding
Build the council dashboard. Integrate Explorer + Sightings into one decision-support product. First paying pilots.
🗺️
OS Data Access
Enhanced Land Cover (UKHAB) auto-classifies every sighting by habitat type. MasterMap Basemap already in production.
🏛️
Council Network
Direct introductions to local authorities. We've never sold to councils — Geovation's network is our route to first revenue.
🎯
Go-to-Market Mentorship
Product-market fit for institutional sales. Pricing validation. Iterate dashboard design with real council feedback.
Without OS data
Sightings float in space. Users manually select habitat types. No standardised scoring. Data is useful but unstructured.
With OS data
Every sighting spatially anchored to OS basemap. Enhanced Land Cover auto-classifies habitat type. Standardised, institution-ready data. Council-grade intelligence.
The Vision
The UK's missing urban habitat monitoring layer.
The dataset that finally answers the Climate Change Committee's question.
Urban Biome Ltd · Company No. 16520770 · urbanbiome.co.uk