reGEN

About the team

We are reGEN, a name that's also our thesis: nature doesn't need to be rebuilt from scratch, it needs the right conditions to regrow. We exist at the intersection of engineering, ecology, and enterprise, working to turn degraded rural land into resilient, biodiverse ecosystems by pairing technology with ecological knowledge rather than substituting one for the other. Our approach treats rewilding as infrastructure, not nostalgia: measurable, scalable interventions - from smarter land-use planning to regenerative business models - that let biodiversity recover while keeping rural livelihoods viable. Several of us bring a track record from Wageningen's Nature-Based Future Challenge series, where our ideas placed among the top teams internationally, and we're carrying that same discipline of grounding bold ideas in feasible, field-tested design into this challenge. reGEN: because the future isn't built. It's regrown.

Our vision

Our long-term goal is a rural landscape where farmland and wild nature share the same ground, and every field edge, embankment and riverbank works as living habitat. Today, intensive farming, bank erosion and the loss of field margins are fragmenting rural habitats, leaving pollinators, birds and soil life with little room to live or move. Farmers depend on this biodiversity, yet rarely have affordable, practical ways to restore it, and conservation plans often lack the data to show where restoration matters most. The problem we want to address is the missing link between biodiversity recovery and everyday rural livelihoods: restoration is seen as a cost, not a benefit. We want rewilding to protect land, support farmers and scale across regions based on evidence rather than guesswork.

Our solution

reGEN turns the unused edges of rural land into regenerating habitat corridors. We plant multi-layer strips of deep-rooted vetiver grass combined with native flowering plants and shrubs along field margins, canal banks and embankments. Vetiver’s dense roots stabilize soil and reduce erosion, which gives farmers a direct, practical reason to adopt the strips, while the native species provide food and shelter for pollinators, birds and small wildlife. Technology makes this targeted and measurable. We combine satellite remote sensing with machine learning to map erosion-prone and degraded edges, rank sites where a corridor would connect existing habitat, and track vegetation recovery over time, so limited resources go where they have the most impact. What makes it unique is the pairing of slope-stabilization engineering with ecology and data science: the same strip protects the land and rebuilds biodiversity, and the same data proves it. This turns rewilding from a cost into a shared benefit for farmers and nature, and creates a model that other rural regions can replicate.