The Smart Forests Atlas is a living archive and virtual fieldsite exploring how digital technologies are transforming forests.

The Smart Forests Atlas is a research platform developed through the Smart Forests research project, which investigates the social-political impacts of digital technologies that monitor and govern forest environments. Our research project considers how forests and technologies are co-constituted. Rather than advocate for smartness, we question how and why forests are becoming technologically optimised to address environmental change.

The Atlas platform includes open data from the Smart Forests project, and provides tools for researchers, stakeholders and publics to gather, explore, analyse, annotate, reflect on and reimagine smart forest knowledges and technologies. Atlases have historically been used as colonial tools to mark out territory and delimit certain bodies’ movements through space. The Smart Forests Atlas seeks instead to open multiple trajectories and connections across plural knowledges and open data co-emergent with smart forests.

The site draws on and extends practices of "digital gardening." Rather than presenting finished ideas, the Smart Forests Atlas is a space for cultivating ideas publicly and sharing multimedia content. It will grow visibly over time and interweave different perspectives, thereby generating possibilities for critical reflection, practical relations, and epistemic justice.

This project has been developed in collaboration with the digital tools cooperative, Common Knowledge. It was first launched at the Participatory Design Conference in August 2022 and at The Forest Multiple symposium in October 2022.

Smart Forests

For more information on the Smart Forests project, contact Prof Jennifer Gabrys.

Follow us on Bluesky and LinkedIn for the latest updates on the Smart Forests project and the Planetary Praxis research group.

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No. 866006).

The Smart Forests Atlas is free to use for non-commercial purposes (with attribution) under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. For more information, please read our licence.

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