Ecological restoration started in France in the 1860’s with the program “Restauration des Terrains en Montagnes” in order to recover vegetation cover to prevent erosion in mountain areas. Since then, and especially from the early 2000’s other restoration projects have been implemented in various ecosystems and with various approach and objectives. There is however few available experience collection and no comprehensive database of these restored areas, except for some specific methods such as soil water bioengineering.

Riverbanks form edges between aquatic and terrestrial habitats. Natural riparian habitats are known for their great biodiversity, which is extremely high compared to their relative area. However, human constructions are often built close to the water. Riverbank protection works with bioengineering techniques can be a compromise both for protecting human issues and preserving riparian biodiversity. This lack of knowledge and experience collection is one of the main obstacles to bioengineering techniques development. GeniVeg is a database gathering the characteristics of soil bioengineering operations in France in order to constitute a tool contributing to the promotion of these techniques instead of civil engineering. The inventory of operations was made from bibliography and field work. Information was assembled in six sections: the work itself (e.g. location , riverbank features), the river (section along  the bioengineering work), the soil bioengineering techniques, the origin of the data (which institute, which project), the plant species and a description of the current condition of the techniques. This database has been developed on the French territory since 2017, which includes the metropolitan and overseas territories. It is managed by INRAE in cooperation with the French Biodiversity Agency (OFB) and aims to identify and characterize Riverbank Soil Bioengineering works.

We will focus on the presentation of this database and its first results, we will also present the project of a future database including all terrestrial ecological restoration projects at the national scale (BDRest).