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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.

There is strong support for the open research agenda among qualitative researchers. This report broadly defines qualitative research as the exploration of communities’ and individuals’ perspectives and lived experiences and how people meaningfully construct and negotiate social worlds in specific contexts. Such research typically involves natural-language descriptions, rather than numerical measurements. However, University advocates of open research and funders’ open research policies tend to frame key tenets and desired outcomes in terms of the priorities, methodological approaches and quality markers of STEMM fields and the quantitative social sciences. Qualitative research is heterogeneous, and STEMM-oriented open-data policies can be at odds with qualitative researchers’ values. Instead of building trust and transparency into the research process, such policies can undermine or inhibit collaboration and engagement that are crucial for ongoing qualitative work. Nevertheless, many qualitative researchers – and we as a working group – feel that open research presents huge opportunities for innovation in our fields and, therefore, hope to make discussions about open research at Cambridge University more inclusive of qualitative researchers’ viewpoints. This report includes a number of concrete recommendations that respond to the dialogic, emergent, abundant and relational aspects of qualitative research by proposing context-specific guidelines, infrastructures and training resources.

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).