‘Smart’ digital technologies are increasingly being deployed to manage, monitor and transform forest environments globally. This technologization is occurring in a context where forests are seen as tools to meet environmental targets (namely carbon and biodiversity targets) and deliver other ecosystems services. The Smart Forests research project studies how the emerging technologies of camera traps, eco-acoustics, GPS and remote sensors are proliferating, and what their social-political impacts are or could be. We scan related literature and ask how technologies are being used by, with and against forest communities. We then home in on four stories of community engagements with forest technologies from our case study research in Chile, Indonesia, the Netherlands and India. We trace shifts in governance and networks; alterations in the power dynamics between communities, states and technology companies; changes in the ways that forests are sensed and know; and discrepancies in the way that technologies are distributed within and between communities. These findings lead us to make a series of proposals for strategies to ensure diverse community-led approaches to forest technologies can be effectively designed, implemented and supported. We seek to enable communities, publics, policymakers, industries and NGOs to better understand the social-political impacts of forest technologies as the users, regulators, funders and developers of these devices and infrastructure. We hope this research can contribute to creating just and thriving forest worlds in a time of far-reaching planetary change.
Summary
Introduction: Community-led forest technologies
Look, listen closely: forests have become gathering places for digital technologies. Drones hum above the canopy, satellites transmit grainy images of tree cover, robots till the earth in regimes of planting, sensors tune into the undersong of the forest, camera traps register reflective eyes, the heat of a body moving through the night.
‘Smart’ forest technologies have begun to proliferate, emerging in the larger context of climate technologies, nature technologies and digital ecosystems. Yet, unlike the more familiar term, ‘smart cities’, whereby digital solutions are employed to enhance or replace traditional urban networks and services, the concept of ‘smart forests’ is still taking shape.
Crossing policy, industry, public and academic spaces, the terms ‘smart’ and ‘forest’ can be fluid, plural, and multivalent. During our research we embraced this plurality by following terms through their use and the practices they activate, rather than offer singular definitions. By smart forests, we refer broadly to the numerous digital technologies and infrastructures that are now managing, monitoring, networking, and remaking forests as they attempt to optimise forests for resources, detect environmental change, and intervene in sites of forest loss.
Smart forests can be found in locations worldwide, spanning remote and urban areas. However, despite the growing presence of smart forest technologies, there has been a comparative lack of engagement with the social-political implications of these devices. Far from being neutral operators in environmental spaces, these technologies can have far-reaching social-political impacts. Our central questions attend to these impacts by asking:
- How are smart forest technologies changing environmental monitoring, management and governance practices?
- What are the social-political consequences of smart forest environments, especially for communities engaged with forests for livelihoods, conservation and regeneration, and recreation?
- How can (more) equitable forest practices and relations be developed and sustained through community-led forest technologies?
Our research with communities asks how smart forest technologies are impacting community dynamics, forest engagements and livelihoods, and interactions with state actors and industries.
As with the terms ‘smart’ and ‘forest’, we engage with broad notions of community. While communities can be local and bounded in terms of space and place, they can also be digital, geographically dispersed and self-selecting. Communities can cross scales of governance or incorporate more-than-human entities. Communities can be created through participatory projects or in order to deploy technologies. Communities can be momentary, episodic or enduring.
This draft report seeks to enable communities, publics, policymakers, industries and NGOs to better understand these social-political impacts as the users, regulators, funders and developers of smart forest technologies. After familiarising readers with how forests are becoming digital environments, we foreground how diverse communities are engaging with, and are impacted by, forest technologies and changing governance practices. Through this research, we also consider how digital technologies are just one type of technology that has been or could be mobilised in forest environments, since ancestral, analogue and ecological technologies are as likely to be used in forests. This draft report homes in on our research into the ways smart forest technologies are deployed in four case study communities across Chile, India, Indonesia and the Netherlands. We are publishing this material now in draft form to generate conversations across communities, policymakers, technologists, and researchers, which will inform the final version of the report. The final report will also incorporate our fifth case study on community-led technologies deployed in landscape regeneration in the UK.
The last two decades have seen an upturn in policy interventions to meet environmental targets through forest management and mass-reforestation. As crucial contributors to biodiversity, water, air and carbon cycles, forests are being mobilised as key ecosystems for environmental action. While targets have slipped in this period, with, for example, none of the Aichi Targets (2011-2020) being fully achieved at a global level, and with the failure to meet the initial targets of the New York Declaration on Forests (2014), international policy interventions and pledges persist. In 2019, proposals emerged to restore 350 million hectares of degraded lands as part of the UN decade on ecosystem restoration; and in 2021 agreements to stop illegal deforestation by 2030 were incorporated into the Glasgow Declaration on Forests (COP26), endorsing the New York Declaration on Forests.
To meet and validate environmental targets such as these, digital technologies that monitor and manage forests are increasingly deployed by actors across public and private sectors. Technology companies and researchers are focusing on developing digital solutions to environmental problems, including ‘AI for Earth’ remote-sensing and data collection or ‘Internet of Trees’ developments for forest management through sensors. Digital technologies are used to track logging activities, optimise resource use, map urban forest networks, monitor carbon capture, and track forest health and disease. Forest digital twins, or virtual representations of physical forest systems, are being developed to predict changes in forest structure and model future scenarios. The rise in forest fires across the globe has also prompted the deployment of wireless sensor networks, drones, and machine learning to detect and extinguish fires as they occur in real time.
Our intention in this research has been neither to simply advocate for nor to only critique smart forests. Instead, we outline how smart forests are being constituted to make more or less liveable worlds, and through what means. The primary purpose of this report is to document and propose strategies to ensure diverse community-led approaches to forest technologies can be effectively designed, implemented and supported. In the sections that follow, we highlight our central questions and findings, situate our contribution in relation to parallel research and policy, and then walk through the research we undertook, including recounting four stories from forest case studies in locations including India, Chile, Indonesia, and the Netherlands. Based on these engagements with forest communities, residents and workers, we highlight how the social-political impacts from forest technologies could be addressed and consider how communities might work with these technologies to create thriving and just forest environments.
Key findings: Ensuring equal and flourishing forest worlds
1) Smart forest technologies are changing forest engagements and livelihoods
Our research found that smart forest technologies can impact how communities engage with forests for livelihoods, altering and accelerating understandings of forests as extractable resources.
For example, remote observation tools may enable communities to monitor deforestation to monetise carbon, at the same time, these tools can produce dominant views of what forests are and how they should be identified and valued. Smart forest technologies’ distinct ways of seeing and sensing can obscure pluralistic, local and Indigenous understandings of forest processes if they are not deployed carefully.
Likewise, technologies that monitor species, such as species ID apps, can lead to increased knowledge of forest species and increased employment opportunities for conserving iconic species, but could also lead to the neglect of less charismatic organisms. Concurrently, such species monitoring technologies could encourage a prioritisation of species that are most easily observed, while overlooking less detectable ecological relations that can be vital to the survival of forest communities.
2) Smart forest technologies are unevenly distributed, and resources are often scarce
Discrepancies in access to smart forest technologies, both within and between communities, can lead to asymmetries of power and information access. This can also be compounded by scarce resources in terms of funding, personnel and knowledge to obtain, implement and use digital technologies, in what are often already constrained conditions.
Uneven distribution of technologies and resources occurs within many forest communities. Our research found that in some communities, smart forest technologies may be more commonly deployed by persons belonging to particular generations, genders and educational backgrounds. This uneven distribution of technologies may disrupt, reshape or amplify existing community power dynamics across these generational, gender and educational lines.
Smart forest technologies may also be unevenly distributed among communities. Some forest communities are more likely to receive smart forest technology support from private and public sources. Communities may be more likely to attract smart forest technologies if they inhabit ‘iconic forests’ (a term used by organisation Climate Outreach to describe forests such as the Amazon that have become ‘global icons’ due to significant media coverage). Likewise, communities may be more likely to receive smart forest technologies if they are better equipped to attract funding (for example, due to language, skills or dedicated personnel). This discrepancy in support and funding may lead to perpetuating cycles that further exclude less connected communities and deepen inequalities.
The distribution of technologies and resources to certain communities can have perverse consequences for others. For example, an interviewee based in a Brazilian environment, science, and technology organisation explained how, when only a select few forest communities are given the tools and assistance to identify and monitor illegal deforestation, illicit logging activities can be displaced onto surrounding areas of forest where other communities have not been able to access the same technologies and resources.
3) Smart forest technologies are transforming forest governance
Since multinational corporations often design, develop and control technologies and networks, smart forests are also causing shifts in some aspects of environmental governance, away from community leaders or government actors and towards startups and technology sectors, including ‘big tech’. Alongside this, evolving carbon and biodiversity markets have prompted an increased private sector interest and involvement in monitoring ecosystems services in forests. Governments and communities across the globe are therefore becoming increasingly reliant on technologies owned and operated by private corporations. Moreover, the increasingly complex computational features of smart forest technologies make it challenging for some non-experts to use them.
An example of shifting governance can be seen when Chile’s National Forestry Corporation, Conaf, uses WhatsApp to coordinate emergency support and issue fire warnings to populations. There are power and resource dynamics at play when governments rely on private corporations building and granting access to digital infrastructures. Similarly, public and emergency services can become reliant on private technology infrastructures that might not have regulations in place to ensure their accessibility and continuity during critical events.
4) Smart forest technologies are shifting power dynamics between communities, states and tech companies
Both state actors and technology companies may use smart forest technologies to increase the observation, datafication, regulation and transformation not only of forest environments but also of forest communities. For example, our research found that some smart forest technologies are being used by certain state actors and technology companies for the surveillance of forest populations. The role of technology companies and state actors in smart forest technologies raises further questions around data ownership, data protection, and data harvesting.
Smart forest technologies can also disrupt traditional power dynamics, allowing communities to document and share abuses of power and generate solidarity movements. For example, smart forest technologies can enable forest communities to use geospatial tools to map their lands and assert their land rights to the state. However, these forms of evidence can be unequally recognised depending upon the communities presenting evidence or making claims.
5) Smart forest technologies can strengthen and enable forest networks
Smart forest technologies can also generate and strengthen forest networks, connecting communities beyond their geographical bounds and facilitating knowledge sharing.
Digital technologies can generate dynamic, interdisciplinary and expansive community networks that cross institutions and scales of governance, connect urban and rural dwellers and partake in international conversations. Examples of strengthened forest networks can be seen in the digital sharing of educational forest resources, in solidarity movements for Indigenous peoples protecting rainforest from deforestation (such as the international support for the Karipuna people) and in urban citizen scientists partaking in digital communities as they monitor forest camera traps from afar (as seen in Mammal Web). Communities can also use digital networks to share knowledge about how best to form and mobilise people and resources for addressing wildfires or other disruptive forest events.
These digitally facilitated forest networks can both broaden and complicate notions of community. At the same time, there is a risk that communities and governments can become dependent upon proprietary apps and platforms, over which they have no control or input. They also raise questions about which communities have the time and resources to foster connections beyond their geographical bounds.
What we read: Community, technology and environment
In drawing together this report, we analysed policy and grey literature relevant to community-led smart forest interactions, which complemented our ongoing review of academic literature. We reviewed over forty policy and grey literature papers, encompassing a range of environmental, social engagement and technology topics. The papers ranged from accessible toolkits targeted at communities or funders to highly technical papers aimed at policymakers, industry actors and NGOs. Our search terms included smart forests, community, carbon, smart agriculture, earth observation, digital forests, forest fires, wildfires, biodiversity, and environmental monitoring. Notably, this review of papers represents only a selection of the grey literature published on these topics and cannot be considered fully comprehensive.
These publications offered useful insights, particularly in recommending innovative ways to evenly engage diverse communities with either technologies or with their local environments. We have let these principles inform our research into community-led forest technologies and allowed them to shape the policy considerations at the end of this report.
We have also been inspired by the creative design and content found in much of the grey literature. For example, publications inviting communities to use their mapping tools and share maps to an online platform, or papers placing audio and visual media in conversation with text (as seen in the ODI’s ‘Power, Ecology and Diplomacy in Critical Data Infrastructure’). Our report borrows from some of these more inventive practices in the hope of attracting diverse readership and encouraging new patterns of thinking.
The grey literature broadly encompassed three themes:
1. The social-political impacts of digital technologies
2. Community engagement with environments
3. Technologies and environments
While papers in these areas offered incisive findings, only a handful of the papers triangulated all three of these themes. Those that did so either focused on a single location, such as Global Systems for Mobile Communications Association’s paper on ‘Mobile Technology for Participatory Forest Management: Co-designing and testing prototypes in Kenya’, or were targeted primarily at communities for practical use, as seen in the ‘Rainforest Tech Primer,’ produced by The Engine Room and Rainforest Foundation Norway.
This report, in response, sets out to connect these three topic areas across forest environments, communities, and social-political impacts of technologies. It also looks beyond singular examples to synthesise insights across locations worldwide, and to address a broader audience of local communities, policymakers, NGOs, industry actors, technology and research funders, journalists, academics and wider publics.
The social-political impacts of digital technologies
In our grey literature review we read papers concerned with the distribution and access of digital technologies. For example, in their paper ‘Affordable, Accessible and Easy-to-Use: A radically inclusive approach to building a better digital society’ the social enterprise, Promising Trouble, argues that digital access is a super-social determinant of health. The paper proposes routes for enacting radical digital inclusion, such as removing economic barriers to digital access through legislation and creating a standard for ‘inclusive-by-design’, which also offers non-digital options. Other papers raised concerns over digital technologies’ accessibility for non-literate people (Mapping for Rights). Notably, while many papers use the terminology of ‘digital inclusion and exclusion’, we use the more pluralistic and nuanced concept of ‘distribution and access of digital technologies’. This more open-ended term encourages a more pluralistic understanding of digital technology, beyond inclusion or exclusion in a more singular mode of technological engagement.
Another topic area covered in the grey literature was co-design of technology by communities. It was suggested that tools and infrastructures created by, with and for communities could strengthen communities, increase the impact of community organisations, and promote diverse and sustainable technology systems. Some papers offered practical guides for organisations seeking to co-design technology products, for example, Data & Society’s paper, ‘Democratizing AI: Principles for Meaningful Public Participation’. At the same time, there are critiques of the conceptualisation of ‘democratizing AI’ since AI may not be amenable to democratising practices given its expense, energy consumption, and technical requirements. The desire to co-design technology products raises questions around which communities are being consulted, how and for whom.
Finally, on this theme of the social-political impacts of digital technologies, we saw papers concerned with the social-political challenges and stakes of critical data infrastructure, such as fibre-optic undersea cables, satellites, and data centres. For example, Open Data Institute (ODI) considered how the ‘physical aspects of the internet reveal its vulnerability to global issues like climate change and geopolitical structures’. Their paper emphasises most societies’ dependence on a functioning internet, the international power dynamics at play in ownership of critical data infrastructure, and the ecological risks of this infrastructure.
This literature developed our understanding of social-political implications of private-public digital infrastructures and highlighted the uneven distribution of digital technologies within and between communities. It also alerted us to ways that communities might be better involved in co-designing smart forest technologies.
Community engagement with environments
Our review of grey literature led us to a robust set of papers advocating for improved community involvement in environments. This literature encompassed topics of community land protection, socially just transitions in land use change and public engagement on environmental issues.
Many of these papers are structured as practical guides or toolkits and written for community audiences. Toolkits such as Community Sentinels’ ‘Methodology Guide for Community Participatory Monitoring’, are composed playfully, with illustrations and non-linear pages, suggesting the importance of design when facilitating diverse engagements. Community Sentinels’ guide frames monitoring as collective care work that generates interpersonal relationships between humans and nature. It encourages community participants to use their senses to attend to biodiversity, climate change and environmental risks, as well as to the cultural landscape, activities, stories and memories.
Other papers are more targeted towards those seeking to engage communities in land use change and environments. The grey literature offers policymakers and organisations pointers on conducting meaningful public engagement with environmental change. Methods ranged from conducting iterative consultations, to supporting trusted messages, to pursuing long-term trusted partnerships, to delegating power and resources locally, to creating nested governance mechanisms. Some reports also proposed experimental interdisciplinary methods, such as engaging communities in ‘Moral Imagining’ that ‘seeks to embed three pillars into decision-making: nature and the more-than-human world, future unborn generations and ancestors and the past’. An example of how communities might be considered and engaged with is suggested by the University of East Anglia’s ‘Socially Just Landscape Restoration in the Scottish Highlands’. This paper urges landscape restoration projects to prioritise social justice concerns such as deprivation and access to land, services and housing. It suggests landscape regeneration should foreground local livelihoods and the non-economic values and priorities of local people, investing in community benefits sharing arrangements, and meaningful participation to strengthen community influence.
This literature review uncovered practical, often creative, methods for foregrounding community voices in their environments. It also deepened our understanding of how environmental projects can impact surrounding communities, both in terms of livelihoods, benefits sharing, health and wellbeing.
Technologies and environments
In our grey literature review we also read numerous papers that discussed technology in environments and technologising environments, with a focus on forests. These papers often had a more technical, academic focus. They ranged from technical papers on climate-smart forestry and agriculture, to those on remote sensing for forest fire management, to papers on technologies for climate mitigation and adaptation. Pathways to meet climate targets and to increase investment in the environment sector were often proposed in papers looking into the intersection of technology and environments. The literature commented on the rapid pace of technological innovation in forests.
Other papers touched on the social-political impacts of the changing nature of commercial forestry and energy transitions in the light of climate change and new technologies, particularly with employment. These papers were generally more targeted towards policymakers, legislators and academics. Examples include the ‘Occupational safety and health in the future of forestry work’, written by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Labour Organization (ILO), and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE). This paper forecasts shifts in forestry work in the context of new technologies, climate change and demographic transformations, and considers resultant human health and safety risks and opportunities. Considering the impact of digital technologies on the sector, the paper suggests that the use of robotics, fatigue detection systems and remote sensors might simultaneously impact employment and yet improve occupational safety and health.
This literature on the use of technologies in forest environments was often highly technical. The less accessible nature of these papers could indicate a lack of interest in community and public engagement by many smart forest technology developers, researchers and regulators.
Our contribution
While there is substantial grey literature on the social-political impacts of technologies, community engagement with environments, and technologies in environments, we found very few publications that drew these three themes together. Those we did encounter were either highly specific in their research location or targeted at communities for practical use. This Smart Forests report seeks to contribute research findings that demonstrate the importance of community engagement and leadership. Our report aims to address and be useful to a wide audience, and to spark unique alliances among various forest actors.
How we did the research
Our research on smart forests was conducted in two phases.
The first phase of research involved a survey of key smart forest technologies and initiatives. This survey was carried out through desk-based research, interviews and fieldwork. The survey of technologies included identifying, testing and analysing key smart forest technologies, such as data analysis and visualisation technologies, apps, platforms, sensors and drones. We tested and studied these technologies, seeking to understand their operation, proliferation, accessibility for general use, and the networks required for them to function.
Our survey of smart forest initiatives spanned locations across the globe – from Romania’s Carpathian Mountains to the Amazon rainforest – and revealed how smart forests generate new practices of observation, datafication, participation, automation and optimisation, and regulation and transformation.
To understand the diverse range of perspectives on the emergence of smart forests, the research team conducted interviews with technologists, policymakers, scientists, community members, activists, creative practitioners and users of smart forest technologies. Interviewees were recruited based on their expertise and experience in smart forest environments. Over 60 of these interviews can be listened to as shorter podcasts on the Smart Forests Atlas Radio. During this first survey phase, the research team also conducted a review of literature on smart environments and smart forests in relation to environmental change.
Phase two consists of in-depth fieldwork to produce five integrated case studies. These case studies reveal how diverse communities are encountering and engaging with digital practices and technologies in their forest worlds. The multi-sited fieldwork allows us to compare the uptake and use of technologies across different social-political milieus. In this draft report we present four of these case studies for discussion and comment. These four case studies traverse distinct field sites, including: the fire adapted forests in the Palguín watershed in La Araucanía, Chile; an ecovillage and ‘living lab’ in the Southeast of the Netherlands; Indonesia’s Bukti Barisan forest; and the borderlands of the contested Rajaji National Park in Uttarakhand, India. We will review comments from the release of this first draft report and consider and incorporate them into the fifth case study, which we are currently developing in the area of landscape regeneration in the UK.
In phase two, innovative research practices have been embraced alongside more traditional research methods such as interviews. Participatory workshops and Smart Forest Field Schools have used digital technologies to generate original ‘live’ data about smart forest technologies. Researchers have hosted practical demonstrations of technologies such as drones and civic apps to engage participants in dialogue. For example, in the Dutch ecovillage, researchers encouraged workshop participants to scan QR codes linked to biodiversity data and to prompt open-ended discussions on local biodiversity monitoring. Meanwhile in Uttarakhand, India, researchers worked with Van Gujjar communities to map their lands both manually and digitally. In Bujang Raba, Indonesia, researchers and community participants experimented with digital technologies such as drones, Avenza software and GPS during forest walks. Interdisciplinary approaches to smart forests were also facilitated by this research, with artists and scientists collaborating on responses to wildfire and ‘firetech’ in the Araucanía region in Chile, and by considering how fire is also an ancestral technology that takes shape through different environmental relations and land practices. Such ‘live’ encounters with digital technologies developed understandings of how diverse actors might use and misuse technologies, and suggested the power struggles that might occur across these differences.
The findings from both phases of research have been documented and engaged with through academic publications and the Smart Forests Atlas. The Smart Forests Atlas serves as an online ‘living archive’, research network and tool to capture and narrate Smart Forests data, including field notes, interviews, maps, stories and social network analysis. The Smart Forest Atlas functions in six languages (English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Hindi and Indonesian) and makes project data openly available and accessible.
The Smart Forests project research team is made up of a transnational group of researchers with relationships to field sites, either through residency or scholarship.
Scanning community-led forest technology initiatives
During our survey of smart forests initiatives, we encountered various technologies or practices that had been shaped by, with, or for forest communities. The table below shares examples of smart forest tools and initiatives that are especially community-oriented, and that foreground community voices, rights and environmental experiences.
We found that communities engaged with smart forest technologies for the following purposes: participatory mapping of environments; community sharing networks and education; observing and regulating deforestation; datafying carbon and ecosystems services (including for monetisation purposes); sustaining forests and the natural environments; and tracking hazards and automating and optimising responses.
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Five stories: Smart Forest case studies
The section that follows weaves together the research findings from our four case studies with communities that are interacting with smart forest technologies. These case studies do not map easily onto each other – their contexts, dynamics and conflicts are distinct. Rather than elide difference, we will seek to home in on the complexities that emerge from each communities’ engagement with smart forest technologies, while attending to resonances across stories.
One crucial thread that runs through all the case studies is that smart forest technologies in themselves are not the primary focus of most communities. Instead, they are tools, evidence, resources, and opportunities for amplifying ongoing environmental projects. The forest communities with whom we conducted research were interested in how technologies could be deployed to achieve their wider ambitions. These tools are part of structural, systemic and ecological interactions that these communities are encountering.
This case study follows the development of a community fire prevention plan in the Palguín watershed, in La Araucanía region, Chile. Originally a Mapuche territory named Wallmapu, meaning “universe” or “surrounding lands,” the region was the last to be formally incorporated into the Chilean nation in 1882. The Chilean state encouraged European immigration to the area as part of its settlement and colonising process. Today, the region comprises Mapuche, Chilean locals, second-home owners, tourists, researchers, students, farmers, conservation foundations, and transient populations of people leaving Santiago for a more rural life.
A distinctive feature of La Araucanía is its many mountains and volcanoes, with some of the most active volcanoes in the world located here. Throughout the region, there are many forests that include the distinctive Araucaria tree (Pehuen in Mapudungun) along with other trees native to Chile.
This research, undertaken in collaboration with the Fundación Mar Adentro, considers how smart forest technologies are being used to monitor and prevent fire in the region and at the Bosque Pehuén 882-hectare private conservation reserve in the Palguín watershed. It asks how communities are engaging with and thinking about digital technologies, and the impact that private and publicly owned technology is having on the social-political relations with this landscape.
This case study looks at Bujang Raba, one of the first community projects in Indonesia to aim to reduce emissions from deforestation. The project was proposed by a non-government organisation, KKI Warsi, to prevent approximately 630,000 tCO2 emissions by protecting a primary forest spanning 5,336 hectares from 2014 to 2023. The project responds to the significant land use changes in the surrounding area since the 1980s, with new palm oil plantations, industrial logging and mining having a profound impact on the natural forests of the Bungo Sub-District. The project covers the five villages of Lubuk Beringin, Senamat Ulu, Sungai Mengkuang, Sangi Letung Buat, and Sungai Telang. By preserving this forest habitat, the project is expected to protect a valuable ecosystem home to endangered plants and animals, including the Sumatran Tiger, Malaysian Sun Bear, Tapir, and sacred hornbills. In this report we follow how the community involved in Bujang Raba have used digital technologies to protect the forest and monitor native species, carbon and illegal activities. We also document the challenges that have arisen (including around government regulatory changes), and how community dynamics have shifted following the introduction of smart forest technologies.
Ecodorp Boekel identifies itself as an ecovillage and ‘living lab’ community in the rural Southeast of the Netherlands. Here, inhabitants have spent the last twelve years developing and reflecting upon sustainable forms of living. The community space comprises 36 rental homes and a food forest-garden on a two-hectare site, surrounded by farmland, a protected forest, and the outskirts of a small village. Inhabitants describe the ecovillage as a ‘forest edge’ (bosrand, in Dutch), where humans seek to live in harmony with their natural environment. Ecological transition zones and wildlife corridors have been nurtured on site.
The ecovillage houses 62 mostly Dutch residents aged between 0 and 71, from diverse socio-economic backgrounds. The comparably affordable rental costs of the ecovillage homes have attracted people from different parts of the country. Two homes are designated for people with refugee status; two homes are assigned for care-dependent individuals. Other than the refugees, most new residents are selected by current inhabitants. The community is simultaneously more diverse than the surrounding rural area and, paradoxically, rather homogenous in the value systems held by inhabitants. Residents, who often work part-time, are expected to contribute voluntary labour to the community’s development (for example, by gardening, doing maintenance, or taking care of outreach activities, finances, or community-building). Inhabitants generally take a keen interest in sustainability-related topics, and are knowledgeable in areas such as ecology, permaculture, herbal medicines, communal living, health, Indigenous knowledge, and biodiversity. The living and communication practices are shaped by continuously evolving community-based methods. The community has international links through the Global Ecovillage Network, as well as links with policymakers, sustainability organisations, funders, and industrial partners.
In this report, we follow the Ecodorp Boekel community’s engagements with smart forest technologies, particularly their experiments in biodiversity monitoring, and consider the impacts and interactions that these technologies have generated in the ecovillage and beyond.
Here Van Gujjar families live on the margins of their traditional forest lands, having been forcibly removed from the Rajaji National Park by the Indian state between 2010-2014. The Van Gujjars, who identify as Indigenous to South Asia, follow Islam and practice transhumance and semi-nomadic activities in the states of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Within Uttarakhand, where this case study is located, there are about 70,000 Van Gujjars spread out across various constituencies in forested landscapes. This fieldsite gathers 80-90 families who have been living and practising nomadic pastoralism for the last 200 years. Notably, the term ‘Van’ translates to forest. There are other Gujjar communities in India, but the forest Gujjars are distinct forest dwellers and have historically been persecuted under colonial criminal laws. This report documents how the Van Gujjars have both been discriminated against with the use of digital technologies and how they have engaged with smart forest technologies to map their lands and claim customary rights.
Engaging and pluralising (digital) technologies in forest communities
Smart forest technologies interact with and mobilise forest worlds in numerous ways. Across our four case studies we trace how very different communities are engaging with multiple forest technologies and to what ends. We outline community-specific perspectives on these technologies and investigate how digital infrastructures relate to and contrast with community practices and understandings of forests. We ask how encounters with smart forest technologies can be made more plural and equitable, so that these technologies do not obscure local environmental knowledge but rather contribute to and enhance it.
Community-based fire prevention practices in La Araucanía, Chile
The forested landscape of the Palguín watershed, in La Araucanía, Chile, is fire-adapted rather than fire-dependent, meaning the vegetation does not require fire but that in some instances, fire might remove ground-level duff and enable regrowth. Nonetheless wildfires can represent a serious risk to both ecologies and human life and habitation.
In the context of climate change and increasing land-use pressures, wildfires in the region are increasing. As such, different agencies within the Chilean government, as well as community organisations and conservation foundations, are developing more localised and technologised fire prevention plans. Community-level fire prevention plans are being designed to map onto the existing nationwide wildfire plans.
There are already many technologies in use in La Araucanía and in Chile more generally for wildfire and hazard monitoring and management. There is active investment in GIS technologies and data platforms for generating emergency management plans that identify risks and develop disaster response protocols. There are also extant nationwide infrastructures for mapping and managing hazards in the form of volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis.
Beyond the broader disaster management infrastructures, Chile’s National Forestry Corporation, Conaf, uses data dashboards, GIS, remote sensing, automated cameras, helicopters, WhatsApp, online toolkits, webinars and training sessions, and many other tools to monitor, identify, prevent, manage, and respond to fires. Some of these technologies are shared across public and private sectors.
In this region, landowners, residents, conservation foundations, and ecosanctuaries also emphasise the role of technology in developing responsible engagement with environments, often for the purposes of water conservation, regeneration and restoration, and planting native species. Conservation foundations use cameras to identify species on site and identify biodiversity hotspots and regeneration opportunities.
The Smart Forest Field Schools and accompanying interviews found that communities have a somewhat ambivalent and even contradictory relationship to technology in La Araucanía and surrounding regions in Chile. Multiple research participants noted that Chile is “not very technological,” suggesting that it lags behind nations with more technological approaches to development. In the region, people also suggest that technology sits at odds with the natural and forested character of the area. In our interviews, workshops and Field Schools, some noted they were wary of techno-solutionism, as well as data collection.
In addition to these perceived or actual technological limitations, the Araucanía region has patchy mobile and Wi-Fi data coverage due to the mountainous and remote character of the region. Not every adult has a mobile phone, and the ability to receive and transmit data can be severely curtailed both for mobile phones and radios. Episodic communication is usual, and in some cases, mountain communities have adopted different systems for communicating through codes and whistles.
This case study revealed the transformations in environmental governance that smart forests technologies can trigger since Chile’s public sector relies heavily on private infrastructure and networks to monitor and create warnings about fire. The fire prevention project, which gathers interdisciplinary actors from different societal sectors, also suggests the potential for smart forest technologies to enhance forest networks and communities.
Community forest protection in Bujang Raba Landscape, Indonesia
The community-managed carbon project in the Bujang Raba landscape covers the five villages of Lubuk Beringin, Senamat Ulu, Sungai Mengkuang, Sangi Letung Buat, and Sungai Telang, and has facilitated multiple forest engagements.
The project, proposed by non-government organisation KKI Warsi, is one of the first community projects in Indonesia to aim to reduce emissions from deforestation. Centred on the REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) initiative, the project sought to prevent approximately 630,000 tCO2 emissions by protecting a primary forest spanning 5,336 hectares from 2014 to 2023.
To develop carbon credits that work in the global market, KKI Warsi followed the standards set by the private certification body, Plan Vivo. As such, the project monitors carbon stocks, socio-economic factors, biodiversity, other environmental services, and the drivers of deforestation using Landsat remote sensing to detect land use in the project area. The project also deploys camera traps, fixed-point photography, forest patrols and the Avenza Maps application to cross-check satellite data. Avenza Maps enables forest patrollers to record evidence of illegal tree felling, encroachment, and fires on the carbon project’s georeferenced map. Quarterly and annual monitoring data are stored at the village project office and by KKI Warsi. The local communities of the Bujang Raba received training from KKI Warsi to use GPS and Avenza Maps. Notably, internet connection is poor in villages, with no telecom provider, and digital connection is not universal, with typically one phone owned per household. Aside from forest monitoring, interactions with digital technology are limited.
To date, this technology-facilitated project has enabled the protection of community forests and ecologies. Some participants in our research suggested that knowledge of forest worlds had deepened due to the community project. The project has also been seen to prevent further flooding from occurring in the region by halting some deforestation for palm oil plantations, land use prone to rapid water runoff. Concurrently the project has provided training and livelihoods for some community members since forest patrollers are paid. In previous years, the carbon project has also funded basic food distribution during Ramadan, though this has come to a halt due to the government regulation changes that have disrupted the project (something that will be covered later in this report).
During Smart Forest Field Schools, researchers sought to pluralise the use of digital forest technologies by encouraging participants to experiment with technology and to imagine possible forest futures. Through Field Schools, researchers also sought to understand how local communities perceived digital technologies and their place in forest worlds. Unlike the case study in Ecodorp Boekel, where forests are seen to be integrated with human infrastructure, participants here conceived of forests as free from human activities and technology, located far from settlement areas. Notably, this binary was fractured slightly by the presence of so-called ‘Wi-Fi trees’ (trees with decent signal), which villagers gather around to access the internet.
This case study revealed how local livelihoods and forest engagements might shift following the introduction of smart forest technologies. Through the carbon project, jobs were created in monitoring and forest patrol and communities were exposed to new ecological knowledge. This case study also suggested how smart forest technologies can alter power dynamics within a community, particularly along generational lines, since younger men in the community tended to use the digital technologies. Moreover, this community carbon monitoring project revealed the complex dynamics between state regulation, technology companies, eNGOs and local communities.
Community-led biodiversity monitoring in Ecodorp Boekel Ecovillage, the Netherlands
The ecovillage and ‘living lab’ community of Ecodorp Boekel in the rural Southeast of the Netherlands seeks to develop and engage with sustainable forms of living. The community engages with many technologies, most of which relate to topics of sustainable building methods, energy efficiency, and recycling practices (for example, an on-site battery that stores energy generated by solar panels and converts it into winter heating). The community is interested in and willing to implement experimental technologies and operate as a testbed for developing future sustainable practices. As a living lab, the community seeks to openly share experiences and enable further research on various technologies. Ecodorp Boekel consequently attracts a lot of external interest.
Until this Smart Forests research project, those living in Ecodorp Boekel had engaged little with digital technologies used to monitor local biodiversity. Through this project, the community interacted with various digital biodiversity technologies, including camera traps, acoustic sensing methods with apps like Merlin, and citizen science apps like ObsIdentify. While these technologies by themselves are not necessarily high-tech methods for monitoring biodiversity, the digital infrastructures and platforms through which this data is analysed and presented are developing rapidly and using increasingly data-intensive computational practices, for example, automated species recognition algorithms and digital twins.
Through this case study, we sought to investigate how these data-intensive infrastructures relate to community practices and understandings of biodiversity on a local level and to understand community perspectives on smart forest technologies. While digital biodiversity technologies were generally embraced and seen as low risk by community members, it became clear that there was a need for these digital technologies to operate alongside other forms of knowledge. Digital technologies for monitoring biodiversity focus mainly on automated species recognition, but this approach could risk erasing other understandings of local biodiversity. Through playful activities in Smart Forests Field Schools, we sort to incorporate and imagine other ways of knowing.
Notably, this case study is situated in the Netherlands, a country known for its development in digital technology and leading environmental technology innovation sector. Nearly everyone interviewed about digital biodiversity technologies on a national level was familiar with this particular ecovillage, revealing how living labs such as Ecodorp Boekel become primary sites for experimental implementation of technologies.
This case study spoke particularly to ways that digital technologies can alter engagements with forest ecologies, suggesting the need for multi-perspectival approaches to forests and technologies. Ecodorp Boekel also demonstrated how smart forest technologies, research and support might be unevenly distributed across regions, with some communities better able to attract funding. Through research with this ecovillage, we witnessed the potential for smart forest technologies to create local, national and international forest networks.
Participatory mapping of Van Gujjar territories in Uttarakhand, India
Van Gujjar communities living on the margins of their traditional forest lands in Uttrakhand are using smart forest technologies to map their territories and generate Indigenous knowledge. These communities are deploying digital tools including Google Earth satellite imagery, smartphone mapping tools, GPS systems and drones.
Following the Van Gujjars’ violent eviction from their lands in the Rajaji National Park by the Indian state (which took place in phases between 2010-2014), the community has sought to assert their land rights through India’s 2003 Forest Rights Act. This landmark law aims to return land ownership to historically dispossessed Indigenous groups. As part of their land claims, Van Gujjars have been creating and submitting digital maps. While hand-drawn maps are often rejected within bureaucratic state processes, digitally generated maps are seen to give accuracy and legitimacy to land claims.
The mapping process is primarily led by the Van Gujjar Tribal Yuva Sanghatan (VGTS), a group of mostly young and educated men, in collaboration with individual researchers and academic institutions. Social media has also given this community a platform to organise and engage. For instance, the VGTS Facebook page and WhatsApp group regularly shares knowledge on livestock or environments as well as incidents of harassment, exploitation and persecution by state institutions or other communities. In the wider structural contexts, where odds are stacked against the existence of the Muslim, nomadic Van Gujjars and their identity, smart forest technologies can empower Van Gujjars to map their lands and resist state knowledge production.
However, not all community members have embraced digital technologies. Older Van Gujjars in particular are hesitant to use digital technologies due to their deep distrust of state processes. Our research suggested that not only did these members distrust the promise of the Forest Rights Act, but also that they associated forest digital technologies, such as drones and camera traps, with surveillance by the state forest department. Political and logistical problems also arise from the fact that the Hindu Nationalist state has made it technically illegal for Van Gujjars to carry GPS or drones into the forest. Notably, access and ability to use digital technology in this community is not universal, though most adults have access to a smartphone. During Smart Forests Field Schools, Van Gujjars also expressed scepticism about the modes of seeing produced by smart forest technologies, which threatened to obscure community ways of knowing.
This case study points to the ways in which smart forests technologies might create dominant views of forest that elide other modes of sensing. The case study also demonstrates how smart forest technologies might reshape power dynamics between the state and the community in differing ways; here, smart forest technologies are paradoxically used both for state surveillance and for participatory mapping. Lastly, this case study suggests the benefits and limitations of digital forest networks and shows how smart forest technologies might reshape dynamics within communities along gender and generational lines.
Fifth Case Study
A fifth case study focusing on community-led technologies in landscape regeneration in the UK is currently in development. We are publishing our research with these first four case studies in draft form to generate engagements and conversation across communities, policymakers, NGOs researchers and industry actors. We will use feedback and insights from these conversations to inform our fifth case study research and shape our final report. Across these first four case studies, communities used and perceived smart forest technologies diversely, demonstrating the importance of place-specific research and place-based practices. Some were wary of forest monitoring devices in the wider context of hostile governments; some were afraid of techno-solutionism; some saw digital technologies as carrying minimal risk. Certain communities emphasised nature as separate from human digital infrastructures, others saw nature, culture and digital infrastructures as integrated. However, common to all communities was the need to navigate narrating smart forest data alongside other ways of sensing forest worlds. Smart Forests Field Schools sought to find ways to integrate digital technologies alongside ancestral, analogue and ecological technologies, and invited communities to consider the social-political impacts that digital technologies generate.
Understanding power and equity in smart forest worlds
Smart forest technologies have social-political impacts on communities that reverberate beyond the ways in which smart forest worlds are encountered as technological devices and infrastructures.
These four case studies offer insights into the complex social-political dynamics of smart forest technologies. Far from being neutral devices, smart forest technologies can shape power dynamics within and beyond communities, generate networks, transform governance structures, and pluralise communities’ engagements with forest worlds.
In what follows, we elaborate on our key findings by drawing out the consequences or co-benefits of smart forest technologies that were evident in case study communities.
Smart forest technologies are changing forest engagements and livelihoods [Finding 1]
Digital technologies can create new livelihoods and forest engagements, as seen in Bujang Raba where employment opportunities have been generated by forest patrols. These technologies can also broaden ecological knowledge through offering access to educational resources, such as species identification applications. However, these technologies also produce knowledge on forests that may risk obscuring other community ways of seeing and sensing. These perspectives may accelerate understandings of forests as extractable resources. Each case study community had to navigate integrating digital ways of encountering forest worlds with ancestral, ecological and analogue forms of knowledge.
The Van Gujjar communities in particular expressed scepticism about the modes of seeing and sensing produced by smart forest technologies. Research participants here discussed how satellite images and state produced maps used to showcase forest canopies in the form of green landcover worked as misrepresentations, obscuring the forest understorey and other ecological markers. The inclusion of monocultural plantations, such as Eucalyptus, caused particular frustration since these plantations are seen to degrade forest biodiversity, generating very little understorey while sapping groundwater. For the Van Gujjars, mapping goes beyond counting elements in a space, acting instead as an opportunity to relive the geographical, ecological, cultural, economic, and social aspects of a place. For example, local sites are named after significant events in the lives of both the Van Gujjars and their buffaloes, with a stream referred to as ‘si’ talai, meaning tiger waterhole, due to frequent tiger encounters.
In order to counter the reductive potential of these smart forest technologies, Van Gujjars and our research collaborators worked to pair digital technologies with community knowledge. During Smart Forests Field Schools, the landscape and community activities were mapped first on paper, where cultural and social markers are more readily included. We then used these paper representations to create digital maps, retaining the social and cultural knowledge, increasing the accessibility of the activity, and pluralising ways of knowing.
Likewise, in Ecodorp Boekel, participants questioned how data-intensive infrastructures related to community practices and understandings of biodiversity. It was found that while digital data masquerades as ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’, the species that digital technologies are able to detect are often limited, leading to issues of species prioritisation. Moreover, the way local communities engage with data is also often highly selective. Participants, for example, narrated and selected data to suit their personal environmental concerns. For example, digital data that suggested a negative relationship between biodiversity and pesticide use on the local farm was more frequently pointed to by participants than other data points. This demonstrates the importance of pluralising engagements with digital technologies and acknowledging biases in the ways they are used. Digital infrastructures should present themselves less as digital mirrors of ecosystems, and more deliberately as tools to narrate environmental stories.
Through Smart Forests Field Schools in Ecodorp Boekel, playful discussions of local biodiversity were facilitated by an interactive installation in which QR code-printed cards were suspended from the ceiling of the community hub. This installation enabled participants to combine digital data on biodiversity with other ways of knowing. The digital data was enriched by knowledge of local land-use conflicts, knowledge of biodiversity and wellbeing, health and pollution levels, possibilities for human land-use in combination with biodiversity flourishing, and understandings of communities as more-than-human entities. Forest walks and conversations with local artists and foresters also enhanced the digital data produced on biodiversity.
Our research suggests that smart forest projects should ensure technologies do not reduce forest worlds—into mapped observations from above, into monetizable carbon or species data—but rather that these technologies contribute to, complexify and enrich existing community ways of sensing and inhabiting forests.
Smart forest technologies are unevenly distributed, and resources are often scarce [Finding 2]
Smart forest technologies are unevenly distributed, both within and among communities, which can be compounded by lack of monetary, personnel, technical or other resources. The uneven distribution of digital technologies can reshape, disrupt or entrench existing power dynamics. In order for smart forest technologies to be truly led by communities, initiatives must be carefully designed to enable knowledge and expertise to be evenly distributed.
Among communities, regional discrepancies can be created through the distribution of technologies and resources to certain communities and not to others. Smart forest technologies tend to be unevenly dispersed regionally as they are often introduced to communities through partnerships with technology companies, private foundations or research organisations. Some forest communities, for example those situated in ‘iconic forests’, are more likely to receive smart forest technology support from private and public sources.
In Chile, we encountered the unequal distribution of technologies, resources and skills networks. Here Chile’s National Forestry Corporation, Conaf, has developed somewhat generic fire prevention plan toolkits. However, in some areas, independently resourced community organisations and private foundations are undertaking bespoke plans and projects for local fire prevention. This points to a need for greater collaboration across sectors, organisations and initiatives to facilitate the sharing of resources and knowledge and prevent regional discrepancies. Resource shortages are an ever-present concern and problem, as many government organisations do not have sufficient resources to mobilise communities, while community groups often experience a lack of funding, technologies and expertise. By building community fire prevention networks that connect across regions, it could be possible to generate ways of sharing funding opportunities, knowledge and tools in ways that help to address resource problems.
This uneven regional distribution of technology was also apparent in Ecodorp Boekel. Here, the ecovillage, with its international reputation as a living lab, PR team and committee dedicated to grant applications, regularly attracts funding and technological support. Ecodorp Boekel sits on the outskirts of a more typical Dutch rural settlement. While efforts have been made on both sides to facilitate interaction - through regular ecovillage open days and annual meetings - there are discrepancies between the funding received and values held in these habitations. Asymmetrical support and funding which prioritises certain communities over others may lead to perpetuating cycles that further exclude less connected communities and deepen inequalities.
The ability to access and use smart forest technologies can also be disparately dispensed within communities. Our research found that this disparate dispersal often occurred along lines of expertise, gender, class or in relation to other pre-existing inequalities. This was particularly evident during our research with Van Gujjar communities in Uttarakhand and with communities in Bujang Raba, where traditional gender and generational roles are rigidly defined. In both these case studies, smart forest technologies slightly shifted dynamics along generational and, though to a lesser extent, gender lines.
Access to and use of digital technologies among the Van Gujjars is primarily limited to young men with secondary education. In this community the family patriarch typically showed little interest in digital mapping or in the community organisation, Van Gujjar Tribal Yuva Sanghatan (VGTS), that is seeking to secure land rights through the Forest Rights Act. The older generations often distrust both technologies and state processes. This leaves younger, educated men as the main users of smart forest technologies.
Similarly, in Bujang Raba, smart forest technologies tend to be operated and understood by young people, particularly those who work in the forest patrol. These technologies have strengthened the youth’s position in the community and led to changes in the Village Forest Management Unit, previously dominated by older men, to include youth. KKI Warsi have also established youth-only activities, something which has caused tensions, with the head of one village complaining that the NGO focuses more on young people than the elderly. These smart forest technologies may potentially create status and social bonds for the younger men in these communities and render older men less important. There is a risk that smart forest technologies may lead to the erasure of certain older generations’ values and ways of sensing and inhabiting forest worlds.
Smart forest technologies also had minor impacts on women’s position in these highly gendered communities. In Van Gujjar communities in Uttarakhand, women do not partake in the decision-making bodies and tend to spend more time in the forest than men. However, since the emergence of the Van Gujjar Tribal Yuva Sanghatan (VGTS), women have begun to be involved in the placemaking and participatory mapping process and a women’s wing has been established. During the Field School, the differing priorities of genders in the Van Gujjar community became apparent through the contrasting sites they mapped. Meanwhile, in Bujang Raba, the community carbon project has led to the establishment of women’s cooperatives in five villages, which produce handicrafts such as rattan. Nonetheless, the separation of genders in work and social settings here has broadly continued and women continue to be absent from the Village Forest Unit committee. Community-led smart forests projects may create new opportunities across gender groups but they may also perpetuate traditional dynamics.
Notably, our Smart Forests research project partook in some of these dynamics of disparate resource distribution since we selected specific communities to work with. These case studies were selected partly as a result of individual researchers having personal ties to the locations and partly as they offered opportunities to understand how communities were engaging with smart forests in different ways. In sharing our findings beyond these selected case study communities, we hope to contribute to broader networks of knowledge and to suggest interventions in the way that research, knowledge and funding are distributed.
Smart forest technologies are transforming forest governance [Finding 3]
Smart forest technologies have led to the increased participation of technologists, researchers, eNGOs and multinational corporations in forests. Since these external actors often design, develop or control the technologies and networks, smart forests are causing transformations in environmental governance. Our research suggests that smart forest technologies are shifting governance away from communities and local and national government actors and towards startups, researchers, NGOs, and private technology companies.
Transformations of forest governance in relation to data practices were apparent in La Araucanía, Chile. Here forest technologies are shared across public and private sectors, with much of the technology used to monitor, predict and prevent wildfires (such as watchtowers and cameras) owned by private forestry companies. The forestry companies share data through data dashboards and command centres with the National Forestry Corporation, Conaf. It is unclear if this data sharing is on a voluntary basis or required by law. The data does not appear to be available to communities and is maintained within a more expert and hierarchical space of oversight and decision-making. Many of these fire technologies give rise to an expertise gap, since fire fighters and rangers have access to data and tools that are not readily available or used by local communities.
Moreover, Chile’s forest governance is also entangled with private companies in key aspects of its communication infrastructure since WhatsApp is relied upon to issue fire warnings and coordinate responses. This dependency raises questions about the possibility for local communities to lead these projects, and points to a transition of environmental governance away from public bodies and towards private technology companies. It suggests that public ownership of technologies and infrastructures or, at least, diversifying the private providers of technologies, might enable smart forest projects and state environmental departments to be more resilient.
In Bujang Raba, we saw on a more localised level how forest governance can transform when local communities become entangled with external partners. Here, while data collection devices are owned by the community (the Village Forest Management committee owns the GPS devices and smartphones are personal), the data collected has little meaning to the local community and is processed by experts in NGO, KKI Warsi’s main office in Jambi City. The more high-tech Landsat data collection is also carried out by KKI Warsi. Notably, data management forms are not used and understandings of data ownership and privacy are limited. In addition, the technologies that community members are trained to use are geared towards meeting the private certification body, Plan Vivo’s standards, rather than being useful to the communities’ daily functioning.
In Ecodorp Boekel in the Netherlands, local participants again raised concerns around expertise gaps and rapid technological innovation and increasingly complex computational features outstripping community knowledge. Local community participants also noted that significant time and energy can be spent helping external researchers with their research projects; on the one hand this shows how community members are able to integrate their values of future making into their everyday lives, but at the same time it demonstrates how external experts with funding might intervene in the governance and ambitions of a local smart forests project.
In light of these findings, our research pointed to ways that communities can effectively govern smart forest initiatives and be involved throughout data collection, data processing and digital design. Good practices included external supporting bodies, such as NGOs, offering sustainable long-term funding, training and engagement. This can be seen in KKI Warsi’s long-term commitment to the Bujang Raba community. Here relationships have been sustained over long stretches of time, with KKI Warsi field team members staying in the villages for three weeks each month. KKI Warsi has also offered training to community members. Likewise, legal researchers have worked alongside the Van Gujjar communities in Uttarakhand for a decade. This iterative, slow support and research helps build trust and community skills. In addition, smart forest technologies should seek to be accessible to as broad an audience as possible; data ownership and privacy should be made apparent to community members; and low-tech, cheaper technologies such as citizen science apps or GPS devices should be used where possible.
Our research also suggested that living labs such as Ecodorp Boekel might enable smart forest technologies, currently developed fairly exclusively by technologists, ecologists and project funders, to be designed more democratically. Living labs can allow communities to feedback on technologies being trialled on site and so intervene early in their development. However, a delicate balance must be struck to ensure that the questions of researchers align with the questions and interests of living lab community members. Careful trusted partnerships must be formed to enable communities to truly lead these smart forest projects and to avoid asymmetries of power and information access.
Our own Smart Forest research intersects with these dynamics. As such, we sought to create reciprocal and sustainable engagements, offering teach-ins on how to use technologies, holding collaborative multi-actor Field Schools, conducting iterative engagements and foregrounding community voices in research outputs. We also hope that the project outputs - including reports, films, podcasts, academic papers, can be useful to communities (for example, as evidence of international attention for Van Gujjar communities submitting land claims). We would like this report to prompt critical discussions about transformations in environmental governance, both locally and beyond.
Smart forest technologies are shifting power dynamics between communities, states and tech companies [Finding 4]
Both state actors and technology companies may use smart forest technologies to increase the regulation, transformation, datafication and observation not only of forest worlds but also of forest communities. For example, the Hindu Nationalist Indian state used smart forest technologies such as satellite imagery, camera traps, and drones to produce knowledge that led to the initial dispossession of the Van Gujjars from their lands. The Van Gujjars, who are viewed by the state as encroachers on forest land, face political marginalisation due to their Muslim, nomadic identity. Smart forest technologies continue to be used by the state for surveillance, intimidation and control of Van Gujjar communities (with reports of drones being used to spray disinfectant on communities during Covid-19). The state also restricts Van Gujjars’ ability to use smart forest devices such as GPS.
In Indonesia, state regulation has intervened, though in less insidious ways, in the Bujang Raba communities’ ability to deploy smart forest technologies to their own ends. The community carbon project in Bujang Raba was abruptly disrupted in October 2021 when the Indonesian government issued Presidential Regulation No. 98/2021 (Reg 98) on implementing carbon economic value for achieving Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC). Under this new regulation, all carbon activities in Indonesia can only be continued once the Indonesia Registry System has approved them. Responding to the new regulation, KKI Warsi registered the Bujang Raba project in early 2022 and underwent a new verification based on the Indonesian regulation. However, the registry system has still not approved the project at the time of writing this report. This has resulted in uncertainty for the community project and demonstrated how the community-led projects may be subject to forces beyond their control.
Smart forest community projects can also be made precarious by the involvement of private technology companies and funders. For example, Ecodorp Boekel is highly dependent on external funding to carry out community and development initiatives. This dependency on external funding creates friction, for while the ecovillage intends to be a space for learning and experimentation, there is internal and external pressure for it to present as a flagship project and successful testbed to attract further funding and support. There is a risk that the living lab may not be able to be fully open when experimentations fail for fear of impacting future funding opportunities. These findings underline the importance of connecting innovation practices to their socio-political relations and finding ways to enable communities to share (self-)critical practices, uncertainty and ongoing issues in connection with the testbed research and innovation that is carried out, without the threat of funding being withdrawn.
Conversely, our research demonstrated how some digital technologies might help to empower forest communities in the face of states and technologists by offering tools to document illegal activities and abuses, map and assert land rights and counter narratives produced by states or private companies. This is clear in the Van Gujjars’ mapping their lands for the Forest Rights Act using geospatial tools including drones and GPS devices tied to their Buffalo’s horns. It is also seen in the Forest Patrollers in Bujang Raba documenting encroachment on the forest land and using technologies to help them protect forest worlds.
Smart forest technologies can strengthen and enable forest networks [Finding 5]
Community-led smart forest projects can disrupt traditional power dynamics by enabling communities to connect beyond their geographical bounds and to engage with their environments.
Through digital networks and due to their technological experimentation, Ecodorp Boekel has developed connections with the Global Ecovillage Network, national and local sustainability organisations, three local ecovillages, funders, and industrial partners. The community is also closely involved with actors at different levels of governance, including local municipality politicians, stakeholders at the province and utility-company level, and funders at the EU level.
The Van Gujjar Tribal Yuva Sanghatan (VGTS) has also used technologies to develop networks. For example, the VGTS Facebook page and WhatsApp group is used to share knowledge on grazing, wildlife, deforestation, livestock depredation as well as incidents of harassment, exploitation and persecution by state institutions or other communities. Digital networks have also enabled the Van Gujjars to connect to the social organisation, the People’s Initiative for Forest Rights - though aside from occasional meetings and workshops on the forest rights act, this group is little engaged with by the Van Gujjars due to time constraints and to the theoretical nature of discussions that do not always map onto the Van Gujjars’ specific context. In Bujang Raba, the carbon monitoring community project has enabled connections with KKI Warsi, Plan Vivo and the carbon markets beyond. These extended networks broaden and complicate concepts of community.
In La Araucanía, among Smart Forest Field School participants and interviewees, there was strong support for connecting and strengthening forest networks through the participation of a greater range of actors. It was felt that technology could facilitate these developments, enabling connections between academic, artistic, conservation, state and community representatives. Education was seen as a way to pivot from wildfire technologies being primarily oriented toward emergency responsiveness and management, towards developing technologies for prevention, communication, and education. Field School participants and interviewees noted that non-state organisations and sectors, including universities, foundations and NGOs, can play an important role in broadening and enhancing the educational and preventive components of forest fire knowledge and responsiveness. Some Field School participants and interviewees felt there was a lack of connection to universities, but that these institutions could be more central in facilitating dialogic, citizen-oriented observations, while supporting community networks and their environmental observations. As interviewees noted, communities can also educate the state, as they often know the most about their territory and are accustomed to responding in comprehensive and effective ways to hazards that occur. At the same time, it was suggested that ministries could be more joined up so as to understand environmental problems in their complexity, rather than on a single-issue basis.
Our research also suggested that if fire prevention is to be foregrounded in La Araucanía as a key component of wildfire practices, then more robust and diverse social organisation, pluralistic environmental engagements, and creative ways of engaging with education and technology are required to create effective community involvement.
Proposals for forest technologies
The following research and policy recommendations offer strategies to enable community-led approaches to smart forest technologies to be effectively designed, implemented, and supported. We consider how the introduction of smart forest technologies can be made more equitable through sustainable support and funding. We propose ways to look beyond digital technologies alone, and embrace a plurality of forest techniques and technologies, including those that are analogue, ancestral and ecological.
The recommendations have been drawn from our interviews, grey literature review and research with case study communities. We hope they are relevant to a broad range of actors in the field of forest technologies, including communities, CSOs, publics, NGOs, funders, technologists, industry actors, researchers, and policymakers.
1. Pluralise engagements with forest technologies to integrate community knowledge
Our research suggested a need for forest technologies—digital and otherwise—to operate alongside other forms of knowing. These technologies should not be seen as ‘objective’ digital mirrors of ecosystems, rather, they should be used as tools to complement environmental knowledge and experience, contributing to and complexifying existing ways of sensing and inhabiting forests.
Looked at in isolation, digital forest technologies risk erasing community ways of knowing and reducing complex forest worlds to mapped observations from above or monetizable carbon or species data. Other less detectable species, cultures, histories and ecological functions may become obscured. Older generations may be particularly vulnerable to having their ways of seeing elided by smart forest technologies since they are generally less likely to engage with digital infrastructure. Community-led forest technology initiatives should work consciously to incorporate ancestral knowledge and differing socio-political perspectives into the design and deployment of technologies.
In order to pluralise ways of knowing smart forest worlds we recommend integrating digital, analogue and ancestral methods when working with community-led forest technologies. For example, during our Field Schools in Uttarakhand, researchers and participants combined participatory paper mapping of village territories with GPS mapping; participants also used video footage to narrate community experiences on the ground and complicate the narrative produced by drone footage. Meanwhile, during Field Schools in Ecodorp Boekel, researchers constructed an interactive installation that combined playful QR codes scanning with community conversations around biodiversity. These conversations also revealed the importance of acknowledging biases in technology design and data.
Understandings of forest worlds may also be pluralised by fostering interdisciplinary and experimental working. For example, in Chile, artists and scientists worked together to produce fire narratives that creatively shaped the community fire prevention plan. Understanding cultural meanings of fire allows effective education and prevention plans to be composed. Moreover, some Smart Forest Field Schools encouraged ‘moral imagining’ which seeks to consider environmental challenges from the perspective of ancestors, future generations and the ‘more-than-human’ world, so complicating technological narratives.
2. Ensure forest technologies are accessible and distributed to multiple community members, while addressing resource limitations within communities
In order to be effectively community-led, smart forest technologies must be distributed and accessible across communities. As discussed in this report, introducing smart forest technologies into communities may shift or perpetuate gender and generational dynamics. Equitable distribution and accessibility are important to enable equitable worlds to be created.
Accessibility can be facilitated by a series of levers at different scales of governance. Alongside the provision of equipment, education and training on technologies, data privacy, processing and storage should be made available to all community members. This should prevent communities from acting as data sources alone. Community leaders and others working with communities should also carefully frame smart forest technologies to ensure that they’re understood to be relevant and contextualised in wider structures and environments. For example, outlining the technologies’ relevance to land rights, livelihoods or fire prevention.
Communities should also be conscious that cutting edge technology is not always necessary to generate effective forest data. For example, across all case studies we found that technologies such as GPS devices, drones and smartphones are affordable, easy-to-use and relatively low-tech, and can facilitate community wildfire organising, participatory mapping, biodiversity mapping, and forest patrols.
Finally, policymakers might consider creating a standard for digital forest technologies to be ‘inclusive-by-design’ and insist upon accessibility for non-literate people. They might also consider addressing resource issues, so technologies are affordable for community groups.
3. Encourage co-design of diverse forest technologies
To create forest technologies that are useful and usable for communities, researchers and technologists should pursue co-design with communities. Digital tools and infrastructures created by, with and for communities can strengthen communities, increase the impact of community organisations, and promote diverse and sustainable technology systems.
Our research with the Dutch living lab, Ecodorp Boekel, suggested that living labs can offer an opportunity for communities to contribute to technology design. Technologies can be trialled on site and iterative community feedback can enable helpful interventions early in technology development. Similarly, in art-science Field Schools in Chile, we found that a more comprehensive view of environments and wildfire materialised when considered across multiple perspectives, knowledges and practices. Notably, technologists and researchers should be careful to ensure that their questions align with the research interests of community members, and ensure their methods are dialogic and iterative, putting community concerns and interests at the centre of development and implementation processes.
4. Mobilise appropriate technologies to connect and strengthen networks
Smart forest technologies have wider political impacts, mediating and modulating community engagement with states, private technology companies and broader networks. Our research suggested that technologies could be used to join up multiple components of environmental monitoring and management, so that biodiversity, climate change, water shortages, and environmental hazards are understood as part of interconnected systems.
We also found that technologies can be used to share resources and advance environmental education and communication. In the case of wildfire prevention, education may help reduce these hazards since the majority are started by humans. This highlights how cultural aspects of technologies are central to how they might be developed, implemented, and maintained.
5. Ensure community-led forest technology funding, research and regulation is place-based, ethical and sustainable
Ethical and sustainable relationships should be developed between communities, funders and researchers working with smart forest technologies. External supporting bodies, such as foundations and NGOs, should offer communities sustainable long-term bespoke funding, training and engagement. For example, the Indonesian NGO KKI Warsi has made a long-term commitment to the Bujang Raba community. KKI Warsi offers training to community members and field team members live alongside the community for long stretches of time. Likewise, legal researchers have worked alongside the Van Gujjar communities in Uttarakhand for a decade. In Chile, numerous conservation foundations both support and can be the sites of community network building for addressing conservation, land management and wildfire prevention, among other practices. Such iterative, slow and sustained support and research helps build trust and ensure that external objectives are aligned with community interests.
External supporting bodies should also consider potential unintended consequences of intervening in community-led initiatives, such as impacts on the wider regions. Funders should avoid perpetuating unequal access to technologies and deepening existing regional inequalities by repeatedly funding flagship initiatives. Instead, funders may look to improve collaboration between communities and consider funding lesser-known community initiatives.
When trialling new technologies, external bodies should prioritise reciprocity and benefits sharing. For example, through listening and responding to community priorities, such as livelihood, including employment, education opportunities, and media engagement. External supporting bodies should consider how technologies can be used to sustain the communities’ daily functioning and local livelihoods, such as agriculture, as well as monitoring forests.
Researchers, technologists and funders of community-led smart forest initiatives should be open to the possibility of experiments failing. For community-led technologies to develop well, innovation practices should be connected to their socio-political relations and communities should feel able to share (self-)critical practices, uncertainty, and ongoing issues in connection with the testbed research and innovation that is carried out, without the threat of funding being withdrawn.
6. Facilitate interdisciplinary, multi-actor collaboration on the use of forest technologies at various levels of governance
Communities should be involved in decision-making on smart forest technologies not only at the local but also at the national level. This allows for more equitable engagements and also enables communities to educate the state, as they often know the most about their territories and are informed on effective ways to observe environmental change, manage forests and respond to hazards.
Our research in Chile in particular suggested that non-state organisations and sectors, including universities, foundations and NGOs, could play an important role in broadening and enhancing the educational and preventive components of forest fire knowledge and responsiveness. It was suggested too that universities could be more central in facilitating dialogic, citizen-oriented observations, while supporting community networks and their environmental observations. Finally, it was suggested that Chilean ministries could be more joined up so as to understand environmental problems in their complexity, rather than on a single-issue basis.
These multi-actor collaborations can be facilitated through participatory mechanisms such as workshops or Field Schools which bring together various scales of governance. A reflexive awareness of roles and positionalities should be encouraged during these discussions.
7. Diversify technology providers and encourage public or community ownership of technologies and infrastructures
Forest technologies are often dependent upon private actors and networks. This can leave both state and community-led smart forest initiatives vulnerable to single market actors. Public ownership of technologies and technology infrastructure might enable smart forest projects and state environmental departments to be more resilient. In the absence of public ownership, community-led forest technology projects might be wise to diversify the private providers of technologies. Ultimately, there is a need for more dialogic, educational, and communication-oriented technologies to enhance responses to changing forest environments, and for a greater diversity of people.
Conclusion
In the context of climate change and biodiversity loss, forests around the world are increasingly being mobilised to meet environmental targets since forests are key contributors to biodiversity, water, air and carbon cycles. To meet and verify these targets, digital technologies that manage, monitor and transform forests are being deployed by communities, governments, technologists, researchers, NGOs and public and private sectors. From LIDAR used to monitor carbon capture, to forest digital twins used to model future scenarios, from camera traps that monitor forest species, to satellites that detect deforestation, there is an upturn in the digitalisation of forest environments. Digital technologies are also being deployed for disaster management with, for example, drones, wireless sensor networks and machine learning used to prevent, detect and extinguish forest fires.
While there has been considerable research into using and improving digital technologies in forests, rarely have the social political impacts of smart forest technologies been explored. The Smart Forests Research Group has sought to fill this gap. Through literature scans, interviews, case studies, Field Schools, playful workshops and desk-based research, we have grappled particularly with the impacts that these technologies have on communities. We have found that smart forests can alter engagements and livelihoods, that technologies may be unevenly distributed within and between communities and exacerbate resource shortages, that smart forests may transform environmental governance and reshape power dynamics between communities, states and technology companies. We have also found that smart forest technologies can strengthen and facilitate forest networks.
Our research and outputs aim to foreground our findings on the social political impacts of smart forests and to propose recommendations for how smart forest projects and initiatives can be truly community-led, effective and just. Crucial to equitable community-led engagements with smart forest technologies is a recognition that digital technologies sit alongside other more-than-digital techniques and infrastructures. These might include ancestral, ecological or analogue forest technologies. To see the knowledge produced by smart forest technologies in isolation would be to obscure other pertinent ways of knowing environments.
Smart forest worlds continue to generate insights. Looking forward we are interested in investigating the socio-environmental impacts of smart forest technologies. While these technologies tend to have positive ambitions to monitor, protect and even create environments, smart forest technologies can also have harmful environmental impacts. Our literature review and interviews emphasised how these technologies consume energy, through data storage and in the production of hardware and installation of connecting infrastructures. The production of hardware often depends on extractive industries for component parts, such as rare earth metals. Smart forest technologies also produce electronic waste, for example, contributing to pollution and debris across electronics lifecycle, and adding to the expired satellite debris orbiting earth. Moreover, one research interviewee questioned how unintrusive some monitoring technologies actually are in ecosystems and suggested that devices such as camera traps may impact species behaviour in environments. We see this as an area that warrants further research.
The Smart Forests Research Group continues to engage with and share research and outputs with the four case study communities while now beginning work on a fifth case study in the UK. We seek engagements with our findings and recommendations beyond technical or academic circles. As such we have developed this paper iteratively, following knowledge exchange workshops which sought to understand how this research could be best shared with forest communities, policymakers, industry actors, researchers and NGOs. We encourage broad engagement with our findings beyond this paper through the resources tagged below and through the Smart Forests website, radio, films and our interactive ‘living archive’, Atlas. We also welcome conversations on any of the themes or proposals above. Should you wish to get in touch our contact is info@smartforests.net.
Acknowledgments
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), and from the Social Science Impact Fund (SSIF) at the University of Cambridge.
The broader context of this research has developed through collective interviews undertaken by the Smart Forests research group, including Kate Lewis Hood, Max Ritts, and Danilo Urzedo. Thanks to Yvonne Martin-Portugues for providing project administration and support to the Smart Forests project, and to Noel Chung for contributing to the ongoing maintenance and support of the Smart Forests Atlas, as well as to Common Knowledge for the design and development of the Smart Forests Atlas, and to Atlas contributors for adding insights on the development of forests and technologies.
Generous thanks are due to the communities who contributed to the research, events, walks, and Field Schools that informed this report, including Fundación Mar Adentro: Bosque Pehuén, Bárbara Acevedo, Sebastián Carrasco, Maya Errázuriz, Felipe Guarda, Madeline Hurtado, Pamela Iglesias, Amerindia Jaramillo, Fernanda López Quilodrán, Valeria Palma, Gianna Salamanca, Pablo González Rivas, Paula Tiara Torres, Amparo Irarrázaval Bustos, Bernardita Pérez, María Jesús Olivos, Violeta Bustos, Roberto Raimann; Universidad de la Frontera: Paola Arroyo Vargas, Andrés Fuentes, Carolina Navarrete González, Álvaro Sanhueza; Villarrica National Park: Felipe Ortega; Agencia de Borde: Maria Rosario Montero, Sebastian Melo, Paula Salas; Altos de Cantillana: Fernanda Romero; KKI Warsi: Emmy Primadona, Famila Juniarti, Jupni, Junaedi, Ihsan, Khairunas; Ecodorp Boekel, Ad Vlems, Marieke Meesters, Marten Schoonman, Boudewijn Toornt, Sanne Raes, Annemarie Hendriksen, Ali Mutahar, Katten Cluster, Huismussen Knot, Biodiversiteitsliefhebbers; Van Gujjar Tribal Yuva Sangathan: Mohammad Meer Hamza, Pranav Menon.
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Credits
Smart Forests materials are free to use for non-commercial purposes (with attribution) under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
To cite this report: Hamilton Jones, Phoebe, Jennifer Gabrys, Michelle Westerlaken, Yuti Ariani Fatimah, Trishant Simlai, and Noel Chung, “Community-led Forest Technologies: An Interim Smart Forests Report”, (3 February 2025), [https://smartforests.net/publications/community-led-forest-technologies]. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14448323.
For more information on the Smart Forests project, visit smartforests.net.
You can find examples of the projects mentioned in this report, along with stories from our case studies and podcasts from our interviews, on the Smart Forests Atlas. You are also invited to contribute relevant material to our Atlas if you would like to sign up as a contributor. More information is available at atlas.smartforests.net.
Web and PDF versions of this report are available at: [smartforests.net/publications/community-led-forest-technologies]
We welcome comments and suggestions on this interim report. You can contact us at info@smartforest.net.