Smart Forests

What are the social-political impacts of smart forests, as digital technologies are becoming key strategies for addressing environmental change?

Forests are crucial to acting on environmental change. They are vital contributors to the carbon cycle, biodiversity, and air and water quality. At the same time, digital technologies are reshaping forests to manage and enhance their environmental contributions. However, these new technologies generate social-political impacts that have yet to be extensively researched.

Using inventive digital practices, fieldwork, participatory workshops and mapping, the research project studies the transformation of forests and forest communities through digital technologies. Through 5 case studies, the project analyzes how forest technologies transform practices of observing, mitigating, participating in, and regulating environmental change. Smart Forests asks how digital technologies are remaking forests and investigates how forests become social-political technologies for addressing environmental change. Situated at the intersection of science and technology studies (STS), digital media studies and political ecology, the research demonstrates how these technologies impact socio-ecological relations and proposes more equitable approaches to digital and environmental practice and policy.