This section 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 community’s 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 to deploy technologies to address environmental concerns and achieve their wider ambitions for improved land practices and community connections. These tools are part of structural, systemic and ecological interactions that these communities are encountering.  

A drone hovers, fixed in the air by its whirring propellers. It is suspended high over snow-capped Chilean mountains. Dark trees stand tall against the frozen peak of a volcano dusted with ash. In this season, forests are thick with bare wintered trees. Rust-coloured branches intersect with the jagged sculptural forms of dark green monkey puzzle trees, or araucarias. The cold bright skies are high flung, exposed.

This case study follows the development of a community fire prevention plan in the Palguín watershed in La Araucanía region, Chile. This area is also 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 people, Chilean locals, second-home owners, tourists, researchers, students, farmers, conservation foundations, and transient populations 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, many forests 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 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.      

The drone skims low over a tropical forest in Indonesia. Clouds swim between soft forested hills. We, too, drift at cloud level. The world below is all vegetation. Then the trees are interrupted by bright paddy fields, the terracotta of settlements, a twist of smoke, a river curling past a village, palm oil plantations punctuating the hillside with rigid patterns. Drawing up higher, look over the crest of this hill to the blue hills beyond. The sky is speckled mackerel. 

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 has used digital technologies to protect the forest by monitoring native species, carbon storage and illegal activities. We also document the challenges that have arisen (including with government regulatory changes), and how community dynamics have shifted following the introduction of smart forest technologies.

The drone takes in the sweep of the ecovillage in the Netherlands. Architectural rings of houses under construction, a swill of water running along a field drain separating the world of the commercial farm with its brown-ploughed fields, from the world of the ecovillage. Feather-footed bantam chickens, cow parsley tossed by the wind, brambles growing wild, a kitchen garden. A woman calling a dog who is chasing a duck. The drone swoops closer into a high-roofed hut where a group of people sit, deliberating.   

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 these technologies have generated in the ecovillage and beyond. 

From the drone view, interlocking pathways are seen carved into the landscape. The vegetation is tussocky, patched with trees. Collections of huts gather as though in conversation with each other. The sun glances off tarpaulins tethered over barns beside the straw-roofed homes. Occasionally, bare white-trunked trees like wishbones rise above the scrub. A river draws a narrow glinting needle through the landscape. The markings of the Van Gujjar’s buffalo herds trace journeys in the earth. It is a cold, bright day and the world bristles with lucid sunshine.

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 and 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, about 70,000 Van Gujjars are spread out across various constituencies in forested landscapes. 

This field site gathers 80-90 families, who have been living and practising nomadic pastoralism within current and past generations 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.

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.

The forested landscape of the Palguín watershed in La Araucanía, Chile, is fire-adapted rather than fire-dependent. Some vegetation, such as the araucaria trees, can withstand lava flows and fire from embers that can occur from the nearby volcanoes. In some instances, low-intensity fire can remove ground-level duff and enable regrowth, but vegetation in this region does not require fire for regrowth (as it does in California, for example). At the same time, landscapes are becoming fire-prone where they previously might not have been due to climate change, rising temperatures and drought, land fragmentation and changing land uses, as well as human activity that creates additional fire risk. Wildfires can pose serious challenges to both ecologies and human habitation in these complex conditions, especially where fires are somewhat newly emerging. 

In the context of climate change and increasing land-use pressures, wildfires in the region are growing in frequency and intensity. As such, different agencies within the Chilean government, 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 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 water conservation, regeneration and restoration, and planting native species. Conservation foundations use cameras to identify species and biodiversity hotspots, along with 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 feel that technology is 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 and 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 forest 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.

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 the non-governmental 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 Bujang Raba received training from KKI Warsi on how 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 the community project had deepened their knowledge of forest worlds. 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 receive remuneration. In previous years, the carbon project has also funded basic food distribution during Ramadan. However, this has come to a halt due to changes in government regulations that have disrupted the project (something that 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 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 a stronger signal), which villagers gather around to access the internet. 

This case study revealed how local livelihoods and forest engagements could transform following the introduction of smart forest technologies. The NGO-facilitated community-carbon project created jobs in monitoring and forest patrols, led to community members developing new ecological and digital knowledge, and impacted certain gender and generational dynamics (for example, younger men in the community more frequently used the digital technologies). Crucially, this project also revealed complex and uneven power dynamics between the local community, state regulators, technology companies and NGOs. For example, the NGO strongly shaped the communities’ interactions with the forest, technologies and new technical knowledge. These dynamics raise questions about what forms of governance would be most effective in ensuring carbon projects can be community-led.

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 makes use of 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 limited engagement with digital technologies 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 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, such as 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 Forest Field Schools, we sought to incorporate and imagine different ways of knowing biodiversity and environments.

Notably, this case study is situated in the Netherlands, a country known for its development in digital technology and leading environmental technology innovation sector. One of the most densely populated countries in Europe, the Netherlands is witnessing biodiversity declines linked partly to surpluses of phosphorus and nitrogen. Recent policies seeking to reduce nitrogen inputs into the environment have led to political tensions and farmer protests. In this fraught political and ecological context, 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 the experimental implementation of technologies. 

This case study showed how digital technologies can alter engagements with forest ecologies and biodiversity, 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.

Van Gujjar communities living on the margins of their traditional forest lands in Uttarakhand 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 share 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 are particularly 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 how smart forest technologies might create dominant views that elide other modes of sensing and relating to forests. 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 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.

Across our first four case studies, communities diversely used and perceived smart forest technologies, 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 feared techno-solutionism; while others saw digital technologies as carrying minimal risk. Certain communities emphasised nature as separate from human digital infrastructures, others saw natural, cultural, and digital infrastructures as integrated. However, common to all communities was the need to navigate smart forest devices and 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.

We are currently developing a fifth case study focusing on community-led technologies used for landscape regeneration in the United Kingdom. This interim report documents our research to date to generate engagement 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.

Smart forest technologies have social-political impacts on communities that reverberate beyond installing and using 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.

Digital technologies can create new livelihoods and forest engagements, as seen in Bujang Raba where forest patrols have created employment opportunities. These technologies can also broaden ecological knowledge by offering access to educational resources, such as species identification applications. However, these technologies also produce knowledge and practices that can obscure other ways of seeing and sensing forests. Digitalised approaches to forests can accelerate understandings of forests as extractable resources, or as carbon stores to offset fossil-fuel emissions. 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 community, in particular, expressed scepticism about the modes of seeing and sensing produced by smart forest technologies. Research participants in this location discussed how satellite images and state-produced maps used to showcase forest canopies as 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, we first mapped landscape and community activities on paper, where cultural and social markers could be more readily included. We then used these paper representations to create digital maps that would retain social and cultural knowledge, thereby 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. Community members noted that while digital data circulates as seemingly ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’, the species that digital technologies can detect are often limited, leading to issues of species prioritisation and over-representation in datasets. Moreover, how local communities engage with data is usually highly selective. Participants, for example, narrated and selected data to suit their individual environmental concerns. For example, participants were more likely to generate digital data and documentation that suggested a negative relationship between biodiversity and pesticide use on the local farm than other data points. Such practices demonstrate the importance of pluralising engagements with digital technologies to account for more pronounced environmental concerns, while acknowledging biases in their use. In this way, digital infrastructures could be mobilised less as ‘mirrors’ of ecosystems and more deliberately as tools to narrate environmental stories and problems.

Through Smart Forests Field Schools in Ecodorp Boekel, we facilitated playful discussions of local biodiversity with an interactive installation that suspended QR code-printed cards from the ceiling of the community hub. This installation enabled participants to combine digital data on biodiversity with other ways of knowing their environments. Community members enriched the digital data with knowledge of local land-use conflicts, biodiversity, pollution levels, health and well-being. They further identified possibilities for human land use to co-exist with and enable improved biodiversity by mobilising approaches to communities as more-than-human entities. Through forest walks and conversations with local artists and foresters, community members further 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 monetisable carbon or species data—but rather that these technologies should contribute to, complexify and enrich existing community ways of sensing and inhabiting forests.

Smart forest technologies are unevenly distributed within and among communities, which can be compounded by a 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 communities to lead and contribute to the design and use of smart forest technologies, initiatives must be carefully developed to enable knowledge and expertise to be equitably distributed. 

The distribution of technologies and resources to certain communities and not to others can create regional discrepancies. Smart forest technologies can be unevenly dispersed as they are often introduced to communities through partnerships with technology companies, private foundations, or research organisations. Some forest communities, such as those situated in ‘iconic forests’, are more likely to receive support for smart forest technology from private and public sources. 

In Chile, we encountered the unequal distribution of technologies, resources and skills networks. 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 and plans that connect across regions, it could be possible to generate ways of sharing funding opportunities, knowledge, and tools in ways that help address resource problems.

The uneven regional distribution of technology was also apparent in Ecodorp Boekel. With its international reputation as a living lab, the ecovillage benefitted from a PR team and committee dedicated to writing grant applications, which regularly translated into 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 prioritising certain communities over others can 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 distributed within communities. Our research found that this disparity 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, 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 the community organisation, Van Gujjar Tribal Yuva Sanghatan (VGTS), which is seeking to secure land rights through the Forest Rights Act. The older generations often distrust both technologies and state processes. Such a situation 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 has also established youth-only activities, something which has caused tensions, with the head of one village complaining that the NGO focuses more on young than elderly people. These smart forest technologies can 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 can 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 has broadly continued, and women are absent from the Village Forest Unit committee. Community-led smart forest projects can create new opportunities across gender groups, but they may also perpetuate traditional dynamics.

Notably, our Smart Forests research project participated in some of these dynamics of disparate resource distribution since we selected specific communities to work with. We chose these case studies partly due to individual researchers having ties to the locations and partly as they offered opportunities to understand how communities were engaging with smart forests in relation to prominent environmental concerns of fires, carbon, biodiversity, and land rights. In sharing our findings beyond these selected case study communities, we hope to contribute to broader networks of knowledge and suggest interventions in how research, knowledge, and funding are distributed.

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, public and private sectors share forest technologies and data, with private forestry companies owning much of the technology used to monitor, predict and prevent wildfires (such as watchtowers and cameras). 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 voluntary 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 firefighters and rangers can 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. It 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. While the community owns the data collection devices (the Village Forest Management committee owns the GPS devices, and smartphones are personal), the data collected is less accessible to the local community for analysis and is processed by experts in the NGO KKI Warsi’s main office in Jambi City. KKI Warsi also carries out the more high-tech Landsat data collection and analysis. Notably, practitioners do not use data management forms and have less articulated approaches to data ownership and privacy. In addition, community members are trained to use technologies geared toward meeting the standards of the private certification body, Plan Vivo, rather than being useful to the communities’ daily functioning. 

In Ecodorp Boekel in the Netherlands, local participants again raised concerns about expertise gaps, rapid technological innovation, and increasingly complex computational features outstripping community knowledge. Local community participants also noted that they can spend significant time and energy helping external researchers with their research projects. On the one hand, this shows how community members can integrate their values of making biodiverse futures into their everyday lives. On the other hand, it demonstrates how external experts with funding might intervene in the governance and ambitions of a local environment project.

In light of these findings, our research pointed to ways communities can effectively govern smart forest initiatives and be involved throughout data collection, processing, and 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 durations, 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 could enable smart forest technologies, currently developed almost exclusively by technologists, ecologists, and project funders, to be designed more democratically. Living labs can allow communities to provide feedback on technologies being trialled on site and 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 lead these smart forest projects and 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, and 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.

Both state actors and technology companies use smart forest technologies to increase the regulation, transformation, datafication and observation of not only forest worlds but also 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 community-led projects can 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 relies 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 if experiments fail, the living lab will not be fully open about results 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, without the threat of funding being withdrawn.  

Conversely, our research demonstrated how some digital technologies might help to empower forest communities by offering tools to document illegal activities and abuses, map and assert land rights, and create alternative narratives to those produced by states or private companies. This is clear in the Van Gujjars’ practices of mapping their lands for the Forest Rights Act using geospatial tools, including drones and GPS devices carried on buffaloes’ horns. Similarly, in Bujang Raba forest patrollers use technologies to document encroachment on forest lands and to create evidence for conserving these spaces.

Community-led smart forest projects can disrupt traditional power dynamics by enabling communities to connect beyond their geographical boundaries and engage with broader environmental concerns. 

For instance, Ecodorp Boekel has developed connections with the Global Ecovillage Network, national and local sustainability organisations, three local ecovillages, funders, and industrial partners through digital networks and technological experimentation. The community is also actively involved with various actors at different levels of governance, including local municipality politicians, stakeholders at the province and utility-company level, and EU funders. 

Similarly, the Van Gujjar Tribal Yuva Sanghatan (VGTS) has mobilised technologies to develop its networks. For example, the VGTS uses their Facebook page and WhatsApp group to share knowledge on topics such as grazing, wildlife, deforestation, and 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. However, aside from occasional meetings and workshops on the Forest Rights Act, the Van Gujjars have limited engagement with this group due to time constraints and the theoretical nature of discussions that do not always map onto the Van Gujjars’ specific context. In a related way, in Bujang Raba, the carbon monitoring community project has enabled connections with KKI Warsi, Plan Vivo and carbon markets. These extended networks broaden—and complicate—concepts of community. 

In La Araucanía, Smart Forest Field School participants and interviewees expressed strong support for connecting and strengthening forest networks through the involvement of a greater range of actors. Many felt that technology could facilitate these developments, enabling connections between academic, artistic, conservation, state and community representatives. Additionally, they saw education as a way to shift the primary focus of wildfire technologies from emergency response and management, toward 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 noted a disconnect with universities, suggesting that these institutions could be more central in fostering dialogic, citizen-oriented contributions, while supporting community networks and their environmental observations.

As interviewees point out, communities can also educate the state, as they often know the most about their territory and are accustomed to responding comprehensively and effectively to hazards that occur. At the same time, some interlocutors suggested that ministries could be more joined up to understand environmental problems in their complexity rather than on a single-issue basis. Our research indicates 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 and sustain effective community involvement.