Search

Digital technologies are increasingly influencing forest landscape restoration practices worldwide. We investigate how digital platforms specifically reconfigure restoration practices, resources, and policy across scales. By analyzing digital restoration platforms, we identify four drivers of technological developments, including: scientific expertise to optimize decisions; capacity building through digital networks; digital tree-planting markets to operate supply chains; and community participation to foster co-creation. Our analysis shows how digital developments transform restoration practices by producing techniques, remaking networks, creating markets, and reorganizing participation. These transformations often involve power imbalances regarding expertise, finance, and politics across the Global North and Global South. However, the distributed qualities of digital systems can also create alternative ways of undertaking restoration actions. We propose that digital developments for restoration should not be understood as neutral tools but rather as power-laden processes that can create, perpetuate, or counteract social and environmental inequalities.

The question of who participates in making forest environments usually refers to human stakeholders. Yet forests are constituted through the participation of many other entities. At the same time, digital technologies are increasingly used in participatory projects to measure and monitor forest environments globally. However, such participatory initiatives are often limited to human involvement and overlook how more-than-human entities and relations shape digital and forest processes. To disrupt conventional anthropocentric understandings of participation, this text travels through three different processes of “unsettling” to show how more-than-human entities and relations disrupt, rework, and transform digital participation in and with forests. First, forest organisms as bioindicators signal environmental changes and contribute to the formation and operation of digital sensing technologies. Second, speculative blockchain infrastructures and decision-making algorithms raise questions about whether and how forests can own themselves. Third, Amerindian cosmologies redistribute subjectivities to change how digital technologies identify and monitor forests within Indigenous territories. Each of these examples shows how more-than-human participation can rework participatory processes and digital practices in forests. In a time when forests are rapidly disappearing, an unsettled and transformed understanding of participation that involves the world-making practices of more-than-human entities and relations can offer more pluralistic and expansive forest inhabitations and futures.

Smart cities typically involve the digitalization of transport and buildings, energy and communications. Yet urban natures are also becoming increasingly digitalized, whether through processes of monitoring, automation, mitigation, or augmentation. This text considers what "splintering urbanisms" materialize through programming nature as infrastructure. By focusing specifically on smart urban forests, I suggest that the management logics of smart infrastructures attempt to program and transform vegetation and its ecologies into uniquely efficient and responsive urban organisms. In the process, these programs of efficiency have the potential to exacerbate extractive economies and social inequalities that amplify and materialize through the "Internet of nature.", This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union���s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant agreement No. 866006).

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.

Drawing from the observation of a general saturation in the discourses centered around the Anthropocene, Jennifer Gabrys and Kathryn Yusoff argue for radical and ongoing critique of hegemonic practices of knowledge. The conversation address questions of materiality in media studies and geology, alternative methodologies, and modes of participation, sensation, and representation, while sketching ways for feminist-decolonial worldbuilding in, after, and against the Anthropocene., Ausgehend von der Beobachtung eines generellen Sättigungseffekts in Diskursen um das Anthropozän adressiert das Gespräch mit Jennifer Gabrys und Kathryn Yusoff die Notwendigkeit einer radikalen und andauernden Kritik hegemonialer Wissenspraktiken. Es skizziert Fragen der Materialität in medienwissenschaftlicher und geologischer Forschung, alternative Methodologien, Modi der Partizipation, Wahrnehmung und Repräsentation und zeigt Entwürfe für feministische Weltentwürfe im, nach und gegen das Anthropozän auf.

Citizens are increasingly using digital technologies to monitor and sense air quality. Citizen sensing, a term that describes these practices, generates multiple forms of citizen data that can be used to support claims made about environmental problems. This chapter documents how citizen-sensing practices to monitor air quality and changing urban environments in Southeast London generate distinct modes of citizen data, as well as specific formations of data citizens and data relations. Citizen-generated data can become one way to attempt to intervene in and reshape processes of urbanization, especially as they contribute to environmental harm and social injustice. This chapter demonstrates how the “right to breathe” and the “right to the city” become articulated through the right to data, which further indicates how rights are not always self evident or easy to uphold. Citizen data and the practices of data citizens become techniques for reinventing rights by working through concrete struggles to evidence harm and to generate more livable urban worlds.

An increasing number of low-cost and do-it-yourself (DIY) digital sensors for monitoring air quality are now in circulation. DIY technologies attempt to democratize environmental practices such as air quality sensing that might ordinarily be the domain of expert scientists. But in the process of setting up and using DIY sensors, citizens encounter just as many challenges for ensuring the accuracy of their devices and the validity of their data. In this article, we look specifically at the infrastructures and practices of DIY digital sensing. Through an analysis of urban sensing in London as an environmental media practice, we consider the specific techniques and challenges of calibrating DIY digital sensors for measuring air pollution in order to ensure the relative accuracy and validity of data. We ask: How are DIY calibration practices expressive of particular political subjects and environmental relations—and not others? And how might we re-calibrate DIY as a digital practice and political commitment through engagements with the multiple genealogies and counter-genealogies of citizen-led inquiry?

Discussing a research project that investigates citizen sensing practices in relation to monitoring air pollution from hydraulic fracturing sites, this paper investigates the types of data that citizen monitoring generates, and the uses to which it might be put. The discussion is located within the wider context of the rise of environmental sensing technologies and practices that are emerging and that seek to enable citizens to use DIY and low-tech monitoring tools to understand and act upon environmental problems such as air pollution. These “citizen sensing” projects intend to gather data, which can indicate environmental change and give rise to political action. However, regulators often contest citizen-gathered data as inaccurate, and as collected through sub-standard instruments and practices. Drawing on a report developed by the US EPA, we use the concept of “just good enough data” to demonstrate that citizen-gathered data can have multiple other uses beyond regulatory comparison and compliance. Describing the collaborative development of an environmental monitoring kit, as well as the deployment of this kit within a participatory research setting, we suggest that the relevance of citizen-collected air quality data should not be solely evaluated through absolute criteria such as alignment to state- or federally managed air quality data, but rather should be incorporated for the unique citizen-based insights and perspectives it provides.

In this paper we address “Just good enough data” ,a phrase and concept that we use to address issues of accuracy in relation to citizen-collected data, and to expand the types of uses that might accompany these new types of data. “Just good enough data” draws attention to attempts to counter the reliance on high levels of measurement accuracy as the sole criterion by which data are evaluated. What different practices emerge when environmental data are engaged with in a more indicative register? What do these practices enable? And what other relations, connections and points of focus might “just good enough data” generate?

Citizen sensing is a term that describes an emerging range of practices for monitoring environments through low-cost and DIY digital technologies. From air pollution to the migrations of animals, sensors generate data on any number of environmental phenomena. These practices often bear the promise of making citizens more empowered to act on environmental matters of concern through sensor data. What ontologies—digital or otherwise—might be specific to these citizen-sensing technologies and practices?