Smart forests and data practices: From the Internet of Trees to planetary governance

Abstract

Environments are increasingly becoming technologized sites of data production. From smart cities to smart forests, digital networks are analyzing and joining up environmental processes. This commentary focuses on one such understudied smart environment, smart forests, as emerging digital infrastructures that are materializing to manage and mitigate environmental change. How does the digitalization of forests not only change understandings of these environments but also generate different practices and ontologies for addressing environmental change? I first analyze smart forests within the expanding area of smart environments, and then discuss five digital practices that characterize smart forests. Based on this analysis, I suggest that forests are not only becoming highly digital environments but also that forests are transforming into technologies for managing environmental change. Smart forest interventions therefore expand the scope of what could count as a technology, especially in the context of data-oriented planetary governance.

An Introduction to Climate-Smart Forestry in Mountain Regions

“…Overall, forest should be managed more sustainably. Managing forests to more closely recall the structure, function, and composition of natural forests, compared with traditional approaches, has been the goal of several silvicultural frameworks aimed to sustain the productivity of healthy forests and to maintain the provision of ecosystem services across successional stages (e.g., Seymour and Hunter 1999;Franklin et al 2007;Puettmann et al 2015).…”

“…Flexible forest management approaches have been proposed to address accelerating environmental and societal challenges, including disturbance-based management (Franklin et al 2007), complexity-related management (Puettmann et al 2009), and mixed-forest management (Bravo-Oviedo et al 2018). These approaches try to incorporate principles of natural forest dynamics, including the role of disturbances in generating the landscape mosaics, applying silvicultural practices and operations that limit the impact of forest management on environmental functions and services.…”

“…Achieving food security and avoiding climate change are two major goals of our time (FAO 2013). Since deforestation and forest degradation account for about 12% of global anthropogenic carbon emissions, forests, forestry, and the whole forestbased sector play an important role in providing sustainable solutions to halting climate change.…”

Continuous Monitoring of Tree Responses to Climate Change for Smart Forestry: A Cybernetic Web of Trees

“…This networked device deploys a range of digital sensors, featuring continuous operability and automatic transmission of real-time monitoring data, which provides the basis for translating functional variables into decision support indicators and new research questions (Bayne et al 2017;Subashini et al 2018;Valentini et al 2019 Obviously, new technologies come with trade-offs, and integration with traditional inventory data collection is advised when planning forest surveys and monitoring campaigns. Proliferation of digital tools and technologized forest also have political and social impacts that need to be considered (Gabrys 2020). Indeed, forests provide key products and services and are crucial to mitigate global change, contributing to biogeochemical cycles and species diversity.…”

Towards Green Smart Cities: Importance of Urban Forestry and Urban Vegetation

“…These smart technologies include remote sensing technology (i.e., Hyperspectral imagery, LiDAR) that enables us to map and assess species and individual trees by integrating with machine learning, and google earth engine is a cloud-based application that can monitor and map land use land cover and the vegetation changes in a global scale. Nowadays, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) help through surveying, fertilizer spraying, and seedling, and detecting disasters (fires, infestation, or windbreak) in forested areas (Nitoslawski et al, 2019;Gabrys, 2020). Smart technologies such as wireless sensors and Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) microchip have been employed to collect information about vegetation and to share the information through web-based platforms (Luvisi and Lorenzinin, 2014;Alsamhi et al, 2019).…”