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 smart forest technologies can be more equitable through sustainable design, use, 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.

These recommendations have been drawn from our interviews and research with case study communities, together with our reviews of existing literature, practices, technologies, and policy. Our intention is to compose suggestions that 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.

Our research indicates a need for technologies—digital and otherwise—to operate alongside other forms of knowing and inhabiting forests. These technologies should not be considered mere ‘objective’ digital reflections of ecosystems. Instead, they should be engaged with as tools to complement environmental knowledge and experience, contributing to and complexifying existing ways of sensing and inhabiting forests. 

Digital forest technologies risk overshadowing community ways of knowing and reducing complex forest worlds to remote mapped observations, or monetisable data on carbon or species. This could lead to the neglect of other less detectable species, cultures, histories and ecological functions. Older generations may be particularly vulnerable, as they are generally less engaged with digital infrastructures, making their perspectives more likely to be overlooked.

Community-led forest technology initiatives should work consciously to incorporate ancestral and local knowledge, as well as differing socio-political perspectives, in the design and deployment of technologies. In order to pluralise ways of knowing and inhabiting 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 featuring playful QR-code scanning to stimulate community conversations about biodiversity. These conversations highlighted the importance of acknowledging biases in technology design and data. 

Understandings and experiences of forest worlds can be pluralised by fostering interdisciplinary and experimental collaborations. For example, artists and scientists in Chile worked together to produce fire narratives that creatively influenced discussions and ideas for community fire prevention plans and networks. By incorporating cultural engagements with fire, it is possible for more connected and viable education and prevention plans to be composed. Moreover, some Smart Forest Field Schools encouraged ‘moral imagining’, which involves considering environmental challenges from the perspective of ancestors, future generations and ‘more-than-human’ entities, thereby complicating technological narratives focused on more ‘real-time’ objectives. 

To ensure that smart forest technologies are effectively community-led, it is essential that they are accessible and distributed among multiple community members. As noted in this report, the introduction of smart forest technologies can shift or perpetuate inequalities, including but not limited to gender, class, education, ethnicity, race, religion, and generational dynamics. For this reason, equitable distribution and accessibility are crucial for fostering fair engagements with technology both within and across communities. 

Accessibility can be facilitated by a series of levers at different levels of governance. It is important to provide not only the necessary equipment but also education and training on technologies, data privacy, processing, and storage. This approach ensures that communities are not merely treated as data sources. Community leaders and collaborators should also carefully frame smart forest technologies in a way that emphasises their relevance within wider structures and environments, such as land rights, livelihoods, or fire prevention.

Communities should also recognise that cutting-edge technology is not always required 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. Such devices and practices can facilitate community wildfire organising, participatory mapping, biodiversity mapping, and forest patrols. 

Finally, policymakers could consider establishing standards for digital forest technologies to be ‘inclusive-by-design’, encouraging and ensuring accessibility for people who may be non-literate. They should also consider addressing resource constraints so technologies are affordable for community groups.

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 Ecodorp Boekel ecovillage demonstrated how living labs can offer an opportunity for communities to contribute to technology design. Communities can trial technologies on-site and send iterative feedback to identify helpful interventions early in the technology development process. 

Similarly, during art-science Field Schools in Chile, we found that a more comprehensive understanding of environments and wildfire materialised across multiple perspectives, knowledges and practices. To connect with and build on these experiences, technologists and researchers should generate research questions that align with the research interests of community members while ensuring their methods are dialogic and iterative by putting community concerns and interests at the centre of development and implementation processes.

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 could help to reduce these hazards since humans cause the majority of these incidents. In this sense, the cultural aspects of technologies are central to how they might be developed, implemented, and maintained.

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 longer durations. Likewise, legal researchers have worked alongside the Van Gujjar communities in Uttarakhand for a decade. In Chile, conservation foundations 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 help to build trust and ensure that external objectives are aligned with community interests.

External supporting bodies should also consider the 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, by listening and responding to community priorities such as livelihoods, education opportunities, and environmental engagement. External supporting bodies should consider how technologies can sustain the communities’ daily functioning and local livelihoods, such as agriculture and 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 effectively, innovation practices should be connected to socio-political relations. Communities should also feel able to share (self-)critical practices, uncertainty, and ongoing issues in connection with testbed research and innovation, without the threat of funding being withdrawn. 

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 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. Community members and Field School participants also suggested that universities could be more central in facilitating dialogic, citizen-oriented observations while supporting community networks and their environmental observations.

Finally, participants and interviewees noted 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 participants from various scales of governance. A reflexive awareness of roles and positionalities should be encouraged during these discussions.

Forest technologies are often dependent upon private actors and networks. This can leave state and community-led smart forest initiatives vulnerable to single-market actors. Public ownership of technologies and technology infrastructure could make smart forest projects and state environmental departments 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.